That would indeed use a loophole in the current mechanism. The expected procedure here would be that the original author declares all foundation members as stakeholders if the RFC policy affects all areas.
There are certainly ways to further tweak the rules, and I’m open to suggestions.
Currently, there are (only) two formal things that make stakeholders special:
- They are notified of RFCs via label or @-mention if possible. I think we can’t safely ignore that part here.
- They can accept formal concerns and with that are the gatekeepers to block an RFC from being accepted.
One way to simplify the RFC process and to address the issue you have raised would be to just allow one or two foundation members to second a formal concern to make it accepted, instead of one stakeholder. The current policy tries to invite feedback from the complete community, while reserving the right to block the RFC to contributors that are actually affected by the decisions (stakeholders). This direction might get lost with such a change.
Also note that I’m not striving for a democratic process here, but rather a consensus-finding process. Otherwise, we could just do a majority vote. In my experience, a consensus-finding process can always be sabotaged by people acting with enough bad faith. Intentionally ignoring stakeholders, like described in your example, would fall under acting with a lot of bad faith in my opinion. In the end, such a huge social issue, isn’t solvable by any amount of written rules.
@ebassi suggested a steering committee consisting of “exactly one representative of each team.” Such a committee would be a prime candidate for intervening with bad faith RFCs. However, I intentionally didn’t base the RFC process on the existence of such a steering committee, partly for the reason that it could be the formalization an even higher concentration of power. In that sense, giving individual teams a bit more power, was already an attempt of softening the centralization of power, while giving people affected by a change (stakerholders) an amplified voice.
But again, I am open to concrete suggestions on how to adjust my proposal.