“The details are not the details. They make the design.”
Charles Eames.
Gaining consensus on an OSS document across multiple stakeholders can be a painful exercise. As we all know, each reviewer will have their own biases, agenda, preferences, etc. This is great when the reviews are picking up vital points, but can be detrimental to a project when they’re stuck in the minutiae that adds negligible tangible value to the project. The problem with all this spar and parry is that it can be very costly to the project in terms of time and labour costs.
An esteemed colleague of mine has a cunning plan for overcoming these types of impasse.
Since most of the stakeholders will have honourable intentions and just want their input acknowledged for all of the effort that they’ve put into reviewing (and re-reviewing) important documents, my colleague ensures that he leaves behind just enough obvious holes that can be identified and discussed during group walkthroughs. The gaps will be across matters that are important for all stakeholder groups, so they’ll all feel equally validated that the gaps have now been filled.
Clever!