Automation of constitutional procedures

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

James A.Treacy writes ("Re: Constitution - formal proposal (v0.6)"):
> [Ian:]
> > I disapprove of the idea of automation.
> > 
> > s4.2(5):
> >       Proposals, seconds, amendments, calls for votes and other formal
> >       actions are made by announcement on a public-readable electronic
> >       mailing list designated by the Project Leader's Delegate(s); any
> >       developer may post there.
> > 
> > Are you proposing a change to this ?
...
> The only aspect that could possibly be interpreted as being in conflict with
> the constitution is that I was planning on having developers send proposals,
> seconds and amendments, etc directly to the system which would then make
> the announcement for them if everything was in order.

This is precisely the aspect I disagree with.  There are a number of
problems with this kind of thing.

Firstly, with an automated system developers' abilities to do things
will be dependent on the bot's interpretation of what is allowed - the
bot becomes the governor of the procedure rather than the Secretary or
the developers together.

Secondly, it is often necessary in procedures such as this to make
`conformal changes' to a document or an amendment to ensure the
consistency of the whole document.  Since a bot cannot tell what is
merely a conformal change and what is a substantive change this will
become impossible, and a human will have to step in anyway to ensure
that what gets voted on makes sense.

Thirdly, with a reasonably complicated procedure like the one in the
proposed constitution it will be necessary to make it as easy and
informal as possible for people to take actions like proposing and
seconding resolutions, amendments, &c.

Fourthly, I don't think developers should be required to learn how to
drive such a mechanism before being able to take part in the
decisionmaking process.

I may be able to think of more reasons later.

Ian.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org