Question for the other candidates: supermajority.
Le Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 12:03:32PM -0700, Russ Allbery a écrit :
>
> For whatever it's worth, I believe the second option changes the
> foundation documents and would require a 3:1 majority. The person who's
> canonical on that is the Secretary.
Dear Russ, Stefano, Wouter and Margarita.
I would like to take the opportunity of Russ's comment to ask to the other
candidates their opinions about the supermajority votes.
After the very painful GR about “Lenny and resolving DFSG violations”,
discussions started about our voting system, and the fact that it does not
accomodate well with mixture of supermajority and regular options. Also,
disagreements whether an option needs the supermajority often starts bitter
debates.
Do you think it is a problem that you would like to solve as a DPL?
During the discussions that started after the GR, I suggested that the GR
proposer should have more control about the options put to the vote. In
particular, it would be useful if he can refuse an option that would
disequilibrate the voting system. That would make him responsible for the
success of the GR: discarding a popular option is taking the risk that the
whole GR is refused and the option is accepted as a separate GR, which is the
kind of public failure that I expect that people will avoid.
For the supermajority, I think that it should be used only when modifying
directly foundation documents. As a compensation, we may let the Secretary
declare a GR ‘unconstitutional’ and refuse to let it be applied. This would
remove a lot of meta-discussion in GRs that already produce many emails. In
contrary with our current sytem, constitutionality of an option would only be
decided after it gets the Condorcet majority. I do not think that it would
create more problems than the current system, where the results of the vote can
be analysed afterwards to show, if it is the case, that an option did not pass
the supermajority but would be the choice of a simple majority of the
developers. This is a crisis situation in general, whatever the vote system is.
This said, I have not mentionned supermajority issues in my platform, since I
think that the main points I propose would keep me busy enough if I am elected.
I would be pleased however if somebody would self-appoint and lead this debate,
if there is the impression that it is needed.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy,
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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