Re: Reforming the NM process
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 11:57:47PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> The weights, currently, are 0, and 1.0.
> > ... but they don't reflect very much the amount of contribution
> > people have made.
> Voting is not based on contributions. (Hint: Linus and RMS
> can't vote).
My point was also under a conditional: _if_ we want meritocracy, we
could put in weights. From your other postings I can see that you have
quite a clear picture of what voting rights are a reward of: commitment,
demonstrated responsibility, and trustworthiness. I disagree somewhat,
but I find this clarity honorable nevertheless: I don't expect many
people (even DD's) to have such a clear opinion about what voting rights
should be / are based on.
The picture is quite like a Hellenist aristocrary or the "democracy" of
the city-states of renaissance. It also presupposes some of the
renaissance view of a human: a view where politics, arts, and work are
all handled equally well by the worthy man. In reality, however, some
of us are better at political fare and some in technical activities. In
my opinion, the way to get everybody to do what they're best at is to
give them the possibility to work on what they're most interested in.
In Debian, this principle is mainly obeyed, except in the monolithical
DD concept.
I don't think anyone is in a position to objectively assess the
different approaches, so let me just state that I don't think the
current approach pays well off. If the point is to keep bad people out,
we could keep those bad people who lack patience out of Debian with much
less effort, while the current process does not block bad people who
really have patience. The one thing you could really do to cut down the
bad effect of non-committed people would be to keep them out of the
mailing lists :) Then you wouldn't need to have discussions like this.
My main point is: we would do well to follow the same principle of
openness everywhere that we do on our mailing lists and BTS. I don't
think it would hurt Debian. Voting is also a way to make contribution,
and a much less dangerous one than the ability to send mail to a
broad-audience mailing list.
Panu
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personal contact: panu.kalliokoski@helsinki.fi, +35841 5323835
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