On Mon, May 03, 2004 at 09:07:13PM +0100, Henning Makholm wrote: > The ballot for the current proposals is shaping up to be rather > complicated. There are currently 5 proposals, plus at least one > in the making, plus "further discussion". > > In the interest of reducing the risk of somebody voting for something > they did not intend to, simply out of confusion, I (meta)propose that > the actual voting part of the ballot should contain ultra-short > summaries of which option is which, rather than just "Option A: > Steve Langasek's proposal" and so forth. > > This was discussed on IRC, and the project secretary agreed in > principle but added that in order to stay strictly neutral he does not > want to be involved in drafting the actual summaries. I therefore > volunteered to write a first draft and try to gather a consensus about > how the actual ballot should look. > > The ideal outcome would be that we find a set of summaries such that > *each* proposer agrees that *all* the summaries are fair and neutral > descriptions of the proposals they apply to. If such a consensus > cannot be reached, we will probably have stick to using proposer's > names instead of descriptions on the ballot, and everybody will lose. > > The following is my initial draft of a set of descriptions. It will > surprise me if everybody is immediately happy with it, but at least it > will give us a target to shoot at. I follow the enumeration of > proposals used on <http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004>. > > [###] Choice A: Postpone changes until September 2004 [needs 3:1] > [###] Choice B: Postpone changes until Sarge releases [needs 3:1] > [###] Choice C: Add apology to Social Contract [needs 3:1] > [###] Choice D: Revert to old wording of SC [needs 3:1] > [###] Choice E: "Transition Guide" foundation document [needs 3:1] > [###] Choice X: Further discussion > > The space for descriptions is rather limited - the vote-taking > software wants each choice to fit on one line, and if the lines get > longer than 72-73 characters, MUA's will begin to wrap them, > invalidating the vote being sent. This implies an absolute maximum > length of 45 characters for the short description. Is the "Choice A: " bit required? I suspect people won't be swayed by knowing which letter of the alphabet identifies their choice, and if they are, I'm sure they can start at the top with A and work their way down... Or we could truncate that to "A: ". Either way it'll free up valuable space for descriptions. As far as the description for B goes, I'm satisfied. -- Duncan Findlay
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