ALL SPEAKERS
AT A GLANCE
Role
Senior Staff Software Engineer
Organisation
Mozilla
Category
Hero
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Yulia Startsev is a programmer on the SpiderMonkey compiler at Mozilla. She served as a chair for Ecma's TC39, the committee responsible for design and development of the JavaScript language. She initiated and co-facilitates the TC39 research group, which evaluates and applies recent academic research to the development of language features. She is a co-chair of PLSS, a workshop dedicated to exploring scientific research in programming language design and specification. Her work focuses on bringing evidence-based reasoning to technical decision making in language communities.
TALK
Design by Committee: The Anatomy of a Disagreement
When a technical problem becomes sufficiently important to enough people, a conversation must be had. Perhaps it will be collaborative, and everyone will agree. But more likely, especially when each party brings a different perspective or framing of the problem, there will be disagreement.
Argumentation is a fundamental part of group decision making. We see it in politics, we see it in technical standards, and we're starting to see it in how we design AI systems themselves. But reaching agreement isn't the same as reaching a good outcome. Everyone nodding along can mean consensus was earned, or it can mean someone stopped pushing back too soon. How do we tell the difference?
We'll look for an answer in TC39, the committee that decides what JavaScript becomes: a body where every consequential decision has to survive being argued for and against by parties who often disagree, with no one holding the authority to just decide. Drawing on experimental work done in and around the committee, including classification of feedback and reconstructing the decision rationale from live notes, alongside recent research on argumentation and group decision making, we'll look at what happens when this process works, and what it looks like when it doesn't. From there, we'll generalize: how to recognize specific communication breakdowns in any group decision, and what tools exist to get a stalled discussion back on track.
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