In the discussions we have had about this process among TechCom members, a complex of questions around actually driving decision making has stood out to me. From my experience with the RFC process, there is two kinds of issues that make it hard to drive a decision process: unclear ownership, and lack of attention.
While the proposal sets out to resolve both these issues, it's not quite clear to me how that is going to work in practice.
Regarding the first issue: If I understand correctly, the idea is that a Decision Team is identified and will be accountable for the decision to be made and acted upon. The document doesn't say however how that is done, or who would do it. It's easy enough if there already is a team that wants to do something. But quite frequently, a problem is identified by a group that is affected, but cannot resolve the problem. See for example RFC: Unify the various deletion systems - the current way MediaWiki handles deletion leads to confusion, data corruption, and performance issues. This has been known for many years, as summarized in this RFC and the ticket it links. But so far nobody stepped up to create and resource a group of people who would be responsible for coming up with a solution. How would the new process fix this issue? How would phase 0 work for this RFC?
Similar issues exist with respect to establishing and changing policies. Do I understand correctly that individual teams will have to take stewardship of the existing development policies? How do we make sure that none are left orphaned?
Regarding the second issue: If I interpret the proposal correctly, the technical forum will consist of about 30 people, which should read, investigate, and react to any communication on the forum within a week. If any of them is on vacation, busy, ill, or otherwise unavailable, the should have assigned a replacement.
From my experience with facilitating communication on complex topics, this is a sizable herd of cats to manage. Who is going to keep track of who is even on the forum at any given time? Who will make sure the relevant people have had time to look into new proposals or questions? One week is a very short time for reacting to a potentially complex question requiring investigation, reading up, asking around. And people tend to forget to say (or even realize) when they are currently unable to follow up in a timely manner.
Once we have started to actively use this process, we are likely to have a couple of decisions in flight at any given time. It seems to me that just managing membership and communication, ensuring that the process is followed and timelines are held, is going to be a full time job. Who will be doing that job? It seems clear to me that this will have to be a dedicated person. This is not really something that can be done on the side, or a duty that can be rotated. That generates too much friction, I think.