Re: Logo swap vote is bogus
Branden Robinson <branden@ecn.purdue.edu> writes:
> [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>]
> On Mon, Jun 28, 1999 at 09:35:51PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> > I think we have a problem with the way the current vote came about.
>
> I don't.
OK, first off, let me say that I wasn't trying to accuse you of any
impropriety, so if I gave that impression, I apologise.
In actual fact, that reason I don't like this vote, is because I'm
tempted to vote for it, but for the wrong reasons.
The result I'd like to see, is the the swirl becomes our general use
logo, and the version that Raul did including the word official at the
bottom becomes our official logo.
Now I could probably achieve that by voting for your proposal, and
them making a proposal to swap the bottle logo, for Raul's new
``Swirl Debian/official'' logo.
So why don't I just get on with it and shut up ?
Well, I'd like to know if these votes are meant to have any permanence at all.
If not, then why are we wasting our time with them ?
If so, then I believe that this result is what we voted against when we
voted for ``Swirl'' in favour of ``Modified Swirl''.
So how come we get to flip that one left-right, then top-bottom in
order to eventually gain a 180-degree rotation of the decision ?
Can we expect this to happen to future votes ?
Personally, I don't think that the inclusion of ``Modified Swirl'' was
fair or wise at that time, and I also think that running the license
and logo votes in parallel was a disaster, since they are
interdependent decisions.
So in conclusion, I'm sure you followed procedure in proposing this
vote, but I also think it's pretty clear that the procedure is badly
flawed (since it seems incapable of giving us final determinations)
and that democracy (as reduced to a simple vote, on the wrong
question) is not a particularly bright decision making method for
Debian.
> *) I personally feel that, insofar as the Debian logo "belongs" to anyone,
> it belongs to all of the developers as a form of community property, and
> must thus be handled democratically. Hence this vote. I did not
> attempt to act dictatorially to implement the logo swap myself, and I did
> not lobby the project leader or anyone else to do so.
But you didn't attempt to build a consensus, without going to a vote,
did you? Skipping the discussion, was a mistake IMO.
I think voting should be reserved for those few cases where we cannot
agree amongst ourselves. By proposing a vote immediately, you stifled
the debate, so that we failed to hear the reasons of people's views on
either side of the issue.
I know it shouldn't be like that, but it seems that people treated the
vote proposal as if it were written in stone, whereas if you'd said
the same thing in a normal mail, you'd probably have got a lot more
feedback. I'm certainly to blame, along with everyone else, on this
point, but I think we can expect the same to happen if we don't change
the climate, if not the policy itself.
Some people might suggest that we could look at fixing that by having
discussion papers (like they do in government) but I'd really rather
that we don't bother with all that. I'm sure we're intelligent enough
to reserve the voting system for things that cannot be resolved by
normal means.
Cheers, Phil.
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