Re: Thanks and Decision making working group (was Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result)
Hi Benda
On 2021/04/19 05:30, Benda Xu wrote:
> I would like to congratulate you for becoming our next DPL.
Thanks!
>> However, I don't think we're quite in a position to pat ourselves on
>> the back here. This vote has once again highlighted some problems in
>> our methods for making decisions. I think that we should set up a
>> working group to specifically deal with voting, polling and
>> project-wide decision making so that we can deal more efficiently with
>> problems in the future.
>>
>> While this vote caught a lot of heat, essentially it's quite a trivial
>> vote. Ultimately it had become a question of if and how we should
>> respond to an external situation. I think that as Debian grows, as the
>> free software eco-system grows, and as software gets ever more ingrained
>> in our every day life, the questions and problems we're going to face
>> will become increasingly complex and that we should adapt to be able to
>> deal with those as a project.
>>
>> Can we go ahead and set up such a working group? I'm thinking that it
>> would involve mailing list discussions, video calls, sessions at
>> DebConf, probably at least one GR, research on different voting methods
>> that could be used, voting software, etc. Fortunately, we're not the
>> only organisation in the world facing issues like these and we can make
>> use of some external experts too. Although all of this will also take
>> some time and effort so I'd really like to have you on board as one of
>> the drivers of this project and also others who have a keen interest in
>> this. What do you think?
>
> The winning option "Debian will not issue a public statement on this
> issue" implies that the majority of DDs is not interested in such
> non-technical affairs. Such a working group will distract us from
> achieving technical excellence.
That's more than just a big assumption, I'd go as far to say that it's a
big leap to assume that from that option. Additionally, you're assuming
that that attempts to fix the problems in our voting system would
somehow make us more political? How do you come to that conclusion?
We've had very large technical GRs which have shown significant problems
in that process causing huge amounts of pain and frustration in our
community, and it comes up regularly how useful it would be to take a
formal project-wide poll on something. At the same time, there's often
confusion about what exact vote rankings actually mean. To the point
where a significant people either don't vote at all exactly because of
that, or their vote actually has a significantly different effect than
what they intended.
Why would anyone in their right mind be apposed to fixing these problems!?
-Jonathan
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