Re: Opposing strict time limits
Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 9:49 AM Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> If your point is, instead, that Wouter's general system is undesirable
>> yes, I largely agree
> Without reflecting on either proposal, I merely cautioned that
> constitutional amendments should be based on sound premises.
...okay? I truly don't understand why you felt moved to caution me about
that, but sure, I agree with that principle. I believe my constitutional
amendment is based on sound premises; if I didn't, I wouldn't have made
it. :)
> As to the point between you and Wouter, is there perhaps a simpler
> measure when a discussion is over—such as one week without a proposal
> that attracted at least three novel supporters (in total)?
I think this is functionally equivalent to Wouter's proposal except even
weaker (you've replaced 6 with 3), so I would prefer Wouter's proposal to
that one.
I suppose the counter-balance is that you say "proposal," by which I
assume you mean ballot option, so each group wanting to delay further has
to produce a concrete proposal, but that makes me less comfortable with it
because it creates an incentive to essentially "spam" the ballot with
proposals in order to achieve the desired goal of extending the discussion
period. Wouter's proposal seems better since it allows people to ask
directly for what they want (a delay) without having to work around the
spirit of the rules to achieve it.
This is also an advantage of Wouter's proposal over mine: my system also
creates an incentive to add a ballot option only to extend the discussion
period. That's also not ideal; I just couldn't see a way of avoiding it
without adding what felt like too much complexity. In my system, that
extension is limited to (normally) an additional week (the intent is to
give people some time to absorb the implications of a new proposal), so I
think the incentive for new ballot options as a procedural maneuver rather
than a true option is lesser and probably won't be an issue in practice.
I also wanted to allow addition of a placeholder option that could be
fleshed out later, and this seemed the simplest way to do that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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