Re: Draft GR for resolution process changes
Thanks Russ for keeping me in the loop,
here are comments from my point of view in the hope of being useful,
please do not take them as objections; I know that you have looked at
the problem through many more angles than I did. By the way, sorry
in advance if what I write today has been already addressed by others
earlier.
Le Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 08:26:00AM -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
>
> Once a proposal has been sponsored and added to the ballot, we, as a
> general social convention, stop sponsoring it unless it feels particularly
> important to be listed as a sponsor.
This practice of sponsoring over the necessary number has always made me
uncomfortable. The more we give importance to the question of who
sponsored, the more we put social pressure on the voters. This is
another reason why I think that limiting strictly to 5 would be better.
This said, anonymous voting (which I think is better to decide in a
separate GR) would solve that problem entirely.
> In other words, I think once a ballot option makes it onto the ballot, the
> rules are attempting to capture the sense that it no longer belongs just
> to its proposer, but now represents some unknown number of people who want
> to vote for it.
My conclusion with the 2008 GR is that removing the original option made
it a better GR. The removal triggered the addition of new options, but
none of them were identical to the original one. Perhaps it would have
happened also even if sponsors had a veto, but I believe that personal
responsibility is going to be more efficient than collective
intelligence there.
> Once people who have sponsored the original ballot option start
> objecting, I think we should take that as concrete evidence that the
> new option is sufficiently different that it may not represent the
> people who were supporting the old option, and we should therefore
> default to adding the new option via the normal mechanism.
Fraknly speaking, I worry that some day somebody will sponsor as many
options as possible and object to changes for the sake of adding
toxicity to GR. The more members we have, the less unlikely it becomes.
But even assuming good will, I think that a process that makes it easier
to remove or merge options would serve us better than a process that
makes it easier to fork options. A lot of GR voters do not follow the
debates on debian-vote, and with too many options, possibly all written
in different styles, there is an increased risk of voting for the
contrary of what we want.
Have a nice day,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan
Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy
Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
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