If i may be so bold as to interject -
We already have this.
It's called writing the SRFIs that you want to and think have general applicability.
There is already a significant amount of new growth. Overloading an existing process with lists of things people want but don't personally want to spend the time working on is a fast way to kill everything.
Deal with the large number of existing issues before making a basket to add new ones.
Yes, you're absolutely right, we have to make sure not to let this turn into a "someone should do this, but I'm not going to" forum. There are plenty of those already, and they certainly can discourage people from making concrete contributions. On the other hand, there's a lot of new energy in the Scheme world, and people are eager to write new code and new proposals, but sometimes they need a place to find like-minded people to test their ideas. The SRFI process is for ideas that have been thought through carefully and are "mature enough for standardization." (Those words are from the
SRFI process document.) So far, the Scheme Topics mailing lists seem to have been a fruitful experiment in bringing people together to discuss specific ideas with concrete, mature code and proposals as their goal.
I'm going to hold off on the idea of a "pre-SRFI" mailing list for now. Instead, I'll try to identify areas where people are eager to discuss ideas that they hope to turn into SRFIs, but where they're not yet confident enough to make a specific proposal yet. That what Scheme Topics mailing lists are for. Now that we have four of them, let's see how they do.
By the way, I think someone mentioned the number of withdrawn SRFIs somewhere on this thread, but I couldn't find the message to reply to directly. I should mention that quite a few of the SRFIs that have been withdrawn were withdrawn because of follow-on SRFIs that were intended to replace them, and others were part of the R6RS process, whose authors announced at the beginning that they would be withdrawing all the SRFIs they introduced once the discussions were complete. Many of the R6RS editors' SRFIs became part of R6RS, which means that that effort was surely not wasted.
Thank you very much for weighing in on this. Keeping our discussions productive is a delicate balance, and I appreciate all the wisdom that Scheme hackers have — not just technical knowledge, but hard-earned experience about how communities and standards succeed and fail, thrive and flounder. Please help keep me on the right path.