I have mostly positive experience with the discussion tickets. It definitely increased my participation during this cycle. Previously, I mostly dealt with blockerbugs once per week on the IRC meeting, where I needed to quickly skim each bugreport in order to form an opinion (of course I could have prepared in advance, but... mostly I wasn't that diligent in this area). With these tickets, I subscribed to the blocker-review project and therefore was immediately notified after each new blocker/FE proposal. So I spent some time on those bugs throughout the whole week, had more time to read them, often helped debug them or add some information and finally cast a vote whenever I felt ready. I spent more time on blockerbugs overall, but I feel it contributed to the release quality and smoother blocker process.

Those tickets shortened the regular IRC meeting considerably. For simple issues, it feels much better to cast the votes async instead of waiting for everyone at the meeting to speak up. Also I can vote whenever I want, instead of being present at the meeting at a fixed time. For contentious issues, the meetings still might have their use. It's easier to discuss our different views in real-time instead of waiting hours or days for a response in a ticket, and remember the context the whole time. Of course the downside is that not everyone can be present. So keeping both channels open might be beneficial for difficult discussions.

One thing I noticed is that sometimes people couldn't remember to keep the discussion split between technical discussion and debugging (Bugzilla) and voting (Pagure tickets). Occasionally people added debugging info into the Pagure tickets. That means people only watching Bugzilla (e.g. maintainers and developers) didn't see that info. I tried to remind people every time I saw this, and hopefully this is only about habit. I admit that it's sometimes not trivial to keep those two discussion topics separated, or not forget about it. With just IRC discussions, we never really had this problem.

In the future, I'd like to improve some automation regarding discussion tickets maintenance. First, a ticket creation should automatically send a comment to Bugzilla, so that the developer/package maintainer and anyone watching knows about the discussion and can participate (we're fairly bad about it at the moment). A it would also be nice to reduce the amount of manual secretarialization needed after a vote is accepted - Bugzilla could be ideally updated automatically with the correct flags.

Kamil