Re: Draft GR for resolution process changes
(cc'ing Charles since I'm not sure if he's reading all of debian-vote; let
me know if this is annoying and I should stop.)
Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> writes:
> It sounds like what russ and Charles are talking about is the following:
> * You as a proposer want to accept an amendment
> * A sponsor objects, and so you can't even though you would have been
> able to if you had fewer sponsors.
> I have an alternate proposed fix:
> If the proposer accepts the amendment and there are k sponsors who have
> not objected, the amendment is accepted.
> (I think it's okay even if we end up counting new sponsors to get to k
> who have not objected)
This and Timo Röhling's similar idea were very helpful for thinking
through this. Thank you!
After pondering this for a couple of days, I'm going to advocate for not
making a change here, even though it looks a bit restrictive. I think the
key point is this analysis:
> But under Russ's approach, the whole amendment process is really just a
> convenience to make it easier to update an option with less withdrawing
> and re-proposing.
I arrived at a somewhat different conclusion given that point, though,
because I think there's a principle of ballot stability here that's worth
maintaining. Here's my argument:
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. That means that any given option
currently on the ballot usually has "hidden" support in the form of
Developers who intend to vote for it but haven't sponsored it. It seems
likely that in some situations those Developers may think "okay, the
opinion I really cared about is on the ballot so I can vote the way I
want" and then may tune out the subsequent discussion.
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.
Given that, if the proposer changes their mind and wants to propose a
substantially different ballot option, I think the default should be that
the proposer do that as a separate ballot option and get sponsors for that
new ballot option (and possibly withdraw as the proposer for the original
ballot option). This reflects the fact that just because the proposer
changed their mind, that doesn't mean that other supporters of that ballot
option also changed their minds.
As Sam says, the ability to make substantive changes if all sponsors agree
is essentially an optimization. It's tedious to propose a new option,
have everyone sponsor it again, withdraw as proposer of the old option,
and confirm that no one else is stepping forward, so for changes that
everyone agrees make the ballot option better, we should have a way to
allow those to be made more easily. But we want some sort of check that
this is really true and not just take the proposer's word for it, so we in
essence draft the sponsors of the ballot option as referees to decide
whether this change does make sense in the context in which they
originally supported that option.
Given that, I lean away from setting the bar for modifying a ballot option
the same as the bar for proposing a new option on the grounds that, once
on the ballot, I think options should be stickier than that and the bar
for changing them should be higher. The sponsors are, in effect,
representing that unknown group of people who were satisfied by that
option and may not be paying attention, so it should be hard to change an
option in a way that may be incompatible with those preferences and, in
the event of any conflict, the default should be to draft a new option.
(But we don't go as far as letting any Developer object, like we do for
the trivial changes provision, because involving people who would never
have voted for the option anyway is less likely to be constructive.)
I believe there is a real bug in the existing constitution in that it at
least implies that someone could sponsor a ballot option solely to then
object to a proposed change to it, which I don't think we want. I mostly
fixed that bug by requiring people have already sponsored the option
before the change was proposed if they want to object. But after thinking
about this some more, I don't think we want to go farther. 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.
Does that make sense to everyone?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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