Re: Streamlining the policy process
Le Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 08:12:51PM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Question
> > ~~~~~~~~
> > I'm happy to hear you have ideas for a smoother policy process. Could
> > you suggest a few? Maybe we can batch them up and make a general
> > resolution. :)
>
> I think the problems with the current process fall into roughly the
> following categories. Different people will disagree over how significant
> these problems are. :) I think the first two at least are clearly
> problems, though.
Hello everybody,
I think that the current process to change the Policy is not too heavy, and
that the limiting factor is the manpower for keeping track and momentum on the
bugs reported to the debian-policy package. We sometimes (often ?) lose
momentum but on the other hand, I think that it is important to go at a pace
where everybody has some time to contribute, which means a time frame of weeks
if we do not want to lose the participation of those who are not available for
temporary lack of time or vacation. This also helps to keep the seconding
system as an indicator that consensus was reached, rather than a vote on gut
feeling.
Looking at http://www.debian.org/intro/organization, there are five delegates
who can commit and upload, which would be more than enough, except that three
of them are not actively working on the Policy those days. This may discourage
contributions by giving the impression that the field is crowded. On my side,
I enquired privately to the DPL for this very reason before starting to do more
generic work on the Policy as I had the (wrong) feeling that this activity
was the the territory of the delegates.
Lastly, Jonathan's case suggest, if we can not have enough active delegates, we
would benefit from letting DMs second proposals. The only risk with this is to
have noise, but abuse of seconding will not change the Policy itself as only
delegates can commit and upload.
In summary, what I would recommend is to call for turnover of inactive
delegates, and allow DMs to second proposals, as seconding is not voting.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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