Well put---and sorry for my coming late to the party and emailing
essentially the same observation before reading the thread to the end).
Very Respectfully
p
On 7/31/24 11:02, Simon Farnsworth via devel wrote:
On Wednesday 31 July 2024 10:53:37 BST Vít Ondruch wrote:
Dne 24. 07. 24 v 20:17 Stephen Gallagher napsal(a):
On Wed, Jul 24, 2024 at 1:46 PM Miroslav Suchý <msuchy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dne 24. 07. 24 v 12:30 odp. Joe Orton napsal(a):
Having a "majority rule" vote of e.g. packagers or provenpackagers on
major technical decisions would be far superior, in my view. Apache
communities have worked this way forever.
You can always propose this as a change to our process.
For what it's worth, I don't believe that this process will work well.
I'm all for democracy, but direct democracy without compulsory voting
inevitably leads to "grievance-based voting", where the majority of
folks ignore the discussion and a plurality of voters with a strong
opinion effectively stuff the ballot box. The effect is to have a
tyranny of the (loud) minority. The closest we could get to
"compulsory voting" would be to require a quorum of votes to be
considered binding, but even the FESCo and Council elections
traditionally see extremely low voter turnout. I don't think we'd be
able to reach a sensible quorum on a referendum-based system.
Actually, I think that this could help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_in_Switzerland#Referendums
E.g. if we figured there are lets say 20 Fedora contributors who are
unhappy with the FESCo voting, all contributors could vote in
"referendum" to (dis)approve.
20 contributors is far too small for the Swiss method to be a fair comparison.
The Swiss system requires 50,000 eligible voters to ask for a referendum
within 100 days, and Switerzland has a bit over 5 million total eligible
voters; that's around 1% (it was increased in the 1970s from 30,000, when the
Swiss franchise went from about 1.5 million to about 3 million).
Fedora has (per https://www.redhat.com/en/open-source/articles/fedora-project-open-source-evolved) over 24,000 contributors, so to be comparable, you'd be
looking at at least 200 contributors (if not 250 contributors) all willing to
express unhappiness with FESCo within 100 days of a decision.
And note, based on https://elections.fedoraproject.org/archives, that only
about 1% of Fedora contributors vote at all. If we copy the Swiss model, that
means that the only way to get a referendum going would be to get every
actively voting contributor to ask for one.
Vít
Beyond that, I don't think the current approach is actually broken.
People elected us to make these sorts of decisions on their behalf. If
any of us were to consistently vote in a way that the general
community members felt is not in the interests of Fedora, then I fully
expect and hope that we would not be re-elected.
The current approach is the best one I can think of for our community:
we have an active feedback period where anyone can (and is encouraged)
to chime in on potential changes. I can assure you that I read that
feedback and I expect that the other members of FESCo do the same. If
you look at our meeting notes, you'll notice we often defer our
decisions when a discussion remains highly active.
As for the accusations of "rubber stamping" all Changes, I'd like to
note that FESCo has declined to accept several Changes this cycle
based on feedback. If you look at last week's minutes, you'll note
that we discussed and rejected two proposals and approved another
reluctantly (due to a lack of better options).
By the time issues get to a FESCo vote, they've generally run through
the discussion and have either been agreed to or the disagreement is
clearly not going to reach a compromise, at which point FESCo has to
make a decision. Sometimes that's going to be controversial (as in
this case, apparently). When voting, we don't always restate our
thought process, which admittedly means that the votes - taken in a
vacuum - can lack context and perhaps appear unconsidered.
--
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