Re: Thanks and Decision making working group (was Re: General Resolution: Statement regarding Richard Stallman's readmission to the FSF board result)

["Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 02:05:20PM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 11:30:48AM +0800, Benda Xu wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The vote in fact shows the opposite.  That interpretation of the result
> would be true if the majority of people voted for that as their first
> preference. They did not: it was the most-agreed upon preference between
> two ideologically opposite factions. The majority of voting DDs
> expressed a strong preference one way or the other.

I agree with all of the above.  I also can't help feel that the result
was probably the best one that could have been reached for the project
as a whole.  In which case, the voting system arguably did its job.

The division was not caused by our decision making process; it was
caused by the fact that this was naturally a question for which there
was nothing like unaminity amongst the voting members.

It is unclear that any change in our voting procedures could have made
things any better.

Cheers,

    	    	 	   	       - Ted