This is a thought-provoking read. I definitely agree with your statement of the problem, and I’ve also noticed that having two individuals go chat out-of-band and report their consensus works really well (e.g. you and josh on the Non-ascii idents thread (kudos)).
My main question is how to build a large group of facilitators. In particular, it seems that facilitators would need to either (a) follow all discussions everywhere always or (b) always have the time to catch up on threads that are about to get heated and head them off. (a) sounds just plain impossible. (b) sounds plausible but exhausting. Moreover, it would be better if discussions never got to that point at all… if the discussion process/format was changed to just encourage doing the right thing in the first place.
It seems like one thing that might help keep discussions concise and useful is an easy way to spin off side-discussions. Currently, with GitHub threads, the easiest way to respond to someone is in-band, so that’s what people do by default. But if it was easier for two people (or a small group of interested parties) to branch off the discussion, have a conversation, and merge back to the main discussion with their conclusions, then perhaps that would become the default. I can see facilitators encouraging this kind of discussion pattern effectively.
In my head, I keep thinking of Slack’s threads. TBH, I don’t really like Slacks threads, but they are great at keeping the main thread clutter-free and they do make it convenient to have side discussions without the need for everyone to see all comments. I’m not necessarily advocating for moving away from Github; I think there are other benefits to github that we should consider. On the other hand, perhaps we should change forums? Or perhaps we just need a bot that makes it easier to spin off out-of-band chats somehow?