Re: Informal Discussion: Identities of Voters Casting a Particular Ballot are No Longer Public
I hear where people are coming from, when they talk about not wanting to
bundle things, but do not plan to conduct multiple
votes.
Fortunately, especially under the constitutional amendment we just
passed, others who want us to act differently have the flexibility to
argue for that.
One of the things I've learned being in Debian for over 20 years is that
agreeing on the question is sometimes harder than agreeing on the
answer.
Whether something is "bundled" or not depends on how you view the
problem. I think the best example of this was the init systems
discussion within the TC, although it was clear that during several GRs
we never did come to agreement on what question we were voting on.
IN this instance, I consider the secretary changes sufficiently related
to the secret vote changes that I don't consider them bundled. Also,
given the DPL's concerns about the number of GRs that are queued, I'd
rather not have more votes than we need. I also believe that what I'm
is consistent with what we've done in the past.
Russ's proposal, which we just passed, included changes both to the TC
voting process and to the GR voting process.
We chose to vote on them all at once because they were related.
In my mind the changes are related enough that it might affect how I
rank them.
It's also a reasonable position to view the secretary changes
as seperable and even to argue about whether the secretary changes or
the secret ballot changes should happen first. It's even reasonable to
argue about whether removing the requirement that votes be conducted via
email is a third separable option. And you could even disagree on the
order of all three of these potentially independent votes.
If you would like to see things unbundled, you have a few options:
Once there is a formal GR on the table, you could:
1) propose and unbundled option.
For example, if you think we should vote on the secretary changes first
and you like them, you could propose an option that includes the
secretary changes without the secret ballot changes.
That option would also be appealing to people who like the secretary
changes but who never want to see the secret ballot changes pass. You
might think that's great. Or you might want to explicitly add text to
your option saying that you think we should vote on secret ballots
later, so that if your option wins, people don't think we'vedecided
against secret ballots.
2) If you don't want to see things intermingled on the same ballot, you
could propose an option explaining what order you think we should vote
on.
Something like "The Debian project believes these issues should be
decided in separate votes. We should first decide on whether to have a
mechanism for overriding the secretary and then decide on whether to
have secret ballots."
Voters will then get to choose whether they want to get it all over with
at
wonce or whether they want to handle things separately.
I think that's the best way we can do given that we have historically
found it next to impossible to agree on what question we are asking or
what order to ask them in.
--Sam
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