Re: Discussion: Possible GR: Enhance requirements for General Resolutions
Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> wrote:
>
> this will mean that future GRs would need 30 other people to support
> your idea. While that does seem a lot (6times more than now),
> considering that a GR affects more than 1000 official Developers and
> uncounted amounts of other people doing work for Debian, I think its not
> too much. Especially as point b only requires 15 people, 3 times the
> amount than now, in case there is a disagreement with the DPL, TC or
> a Delegate.
I think that's too much. A quick count of discussions around the
recent GR suggests that only 79 people participated and I'm sure
that included many non-DDs. Given that a reasonable ballot would
have 4 alternatives (one-off exception, permanent exception, no
exceptions ever and release team discretion) as well as
compromise options (which rarely appear at the minute), I think
finding 4 groups of 30 DDs from 79 posters is unlikely. If the
recent criticism of DDs who second worthy-but-not-preferred
options succeeds in discouraging them, it would be impossible.
What are the consequences of setting the bar too high? Well, I
think it would favour organised campaign groups, it encourages
clustering around flags too early rather than seeking compromises
and the first hint of voter fatigue will probably result in no
further options being added to the ballot. That would be fine if
people sought compromise *before* calling for seconds (as is
happening now) but there is no requirement for that and it
doesn't seem to have happened often in the archives.
What number of seconds do other systems require for a proposal?
If I remember rightly, my local council (3200 inhabitants - maybe
2400 eligible voters?) requires no seconds to put a question to a
council meeting (which must be addressed), one elected second to
propose a solution, something like 9 seconds to call an election
and one second to stand for election. It seems a remarkably
stable council.
My largest company (3 million voters) requires one elected second
to put a question to some meetings and I think five seconds for
others and two seconds to stand for election to the first
level (I don't know about higher levels).
I'd welcome other examples - or especially expert analysis.
In the absence of that, my current view is that floor(Q) for a GR
and floor(Q/2) for disagreements would be reasonable as the next
step. Why should it be more?
Note: I counted number of participants with the rc shell command:
; curl -s http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2008/^(10 11 12)^/ \
| sed -n -e '/DFSG/{;s/^.*<em>//;s/<.*$//;p;}' | sort | uniq -c | wc -l
79
Hope that helps,
--
MJ Ray (slef)
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