A lot of commentary has been given in the last few years, both on and
off the SRFI lists, about the increasing use of the SRFI process for
experimental libraries. It has been repeatedly observed that the process
does not work well for this purpose.

We keep submitting experimental work to SRFI since it's the singular
Scheme institution where authors can get wide exposure and high quality
peer review for their work.

Scheme has several package managers that work well for shipping code.
But those don't fill in the social aspect where SRFI excels.

Therefore I propose that we start a new institution, Scheme Review, for
peer review of code and specifications of all kinds.

Scheme Review would have the social structure of SRFI, but without the
deadlines and the focus on "Requests for Implementation". You could send
anything from half-baked code snippets to polished long-form documents.
Individual people could make recommendations on the fitness of the
submitted artifacts for various purposes, but the process itself would
not be constrained around such a goal.

Our earlier experiment to take the load off SRFI was to start the
https://github.com/pre-srfi organization. It was a limited success
(spawning several proper SRFIs and lots of good drafting and discussion)
but the volume of work and discussion has gradually died down. The thing
it's missing from SRFI is rhythm. We made commits to git at our leisure,
which people usually didn't pick up on.

The pace at SRFI has stayed relatively constant, perhaps because the
process itself keeps pace. Authors have to put together formal drafts,
which are announced to all. These announcements trickle in at intervals,
so readers grow accustomed to a familiar rhythm. Scheme Review would
keep this structure of iterating on drafts, but without the deadlines.

Would anybody interested in trying out this experiment? If so, we could
start review.scheme.org and set up a mailing list or web forum to get it
going. I don't know whether it will work out, but I think it's worth
trying things to fill the needs that SRFI is struggling to accommodate.

[I've mentioned in other threads a more general library design process.
This isn't it; this is just free-form peer review.]