Hello Debian Members,
For some time, we have been having systemic issues that make GR
discussions painful. GRs themselves shouldn't be painful, and don't need
to be. Having a chilling effect to using GRs hurts Debian, and as a
project we need a way to poll for consensus on project choices and
directions more often than not.
To overcome the current problems with GR discussions, we introduce a
replacement weighted democratic system. The new procedure is this:
* A developer proposes an issue with a signed message on
debian-vote@lists.debian.org .
* Anyone can express their consent or dissent by replying to the
message.
* When the discussion eventually dies down, the Debian Secretary will
review all messages and pronounce the winner.
This method makes the fair assumption that the energy spent in writing
messages to the discussion is related to the amount of insight a person
has on an issue, and how much they care about it. In particular:
* The more messages a person writes, the more the person cares, and the
more their opinion will be taken into account: people who only write
every once in a while, clearly don't think the issue is important
enough to deserve their real effort.
* The more strongly worded replies are, the more the person cares, and
the more their opinion will be taken into account: people who waste
time with long, polite, well reasoned messages, clearly didn't care
enough to get emotional about an issue.
* The longer a person keeps writing, the more the person cares, and the
more their opinion will be taken into account: people who give up,
clearly didn't care enough to make themselves heard.
To avoid confusion, we'll maintain the same acronym as before. The new
system will be called Debian Grandiose Reflection.
The first GR using this scheme will concern the introduction of this
voting scheme for the future.
Enrico
--
GPG key: 4096R/634F4BD1E7AD5568 2009-05-08 Enrico Zini <enrico@enricozini.org>