Daniel Vainsencher a écrit :
Hi everyone. I personally think that Andreas Raab has a completely legitimate complaint. I don't think the community has the tools to make transparent decisions in a way that is participative, so the best that can happen at the moment is a mailing list discussion that sort of peters out and then someone decides what happened.
These things take a lot of time, and in the end, the decision is not really representative. I think this outcome is characteristic of email - it is hard to do much better in this medium.
In the context of the coming stepping down of the (self selected) SqF Board, an election team has been formed, and a few of us think that the first ingredient we need to be a community that makes represented decisions, is a voting system. This consists of some software (website that allows issues and alternative solutions to be registered), some rules (who gets to vote?), and mostly the participation of the community.
May be thinking about what is the target/goal of a SqueakFoundation could help to decide what is the most suitable organisation (I would not say political organisation because it is not about organising a civil society but to lead a project). As a squeak user, I want a Squeak Foundation able to make evolve Squeak, to make it more robust, faster, legal proof, etc. blabla. Althought I have to admit I don't know how this can be done. To say the true I don't care about election going on in a Squeakfoundation as I did not care SqueakCentral was closed as a black box.
I think at a tech & legal level, what matter is to have brillant people working together, this is why I think that a cooptation internal election could be a viable and easier option, which avoid these people spending too much time in administrative matter. IMHO, a Squeak foundation board should be composed of a large spectrum of the people who make Squeak alive.
Hilaire
Our current proposal for the voting software is at http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5835
We are looking for comment on these requirements, and for someone with web development skills to help implement.
There are existing systems that provide part of the functionality, for example CIVS at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html
The reason to roll our own solution here is that we want to automate the whole process, in order to make it possible for anyone to initiate a vote, with no hidden parts.
About eligibility to vote, this is a more contentious issue I am not addressing here, except to mention that we want to be able to represent the wide Squeak community, and that we generally think SqP is not a bad mechanism for registering voters.
Daniel PS - the coming elections will probably be performed in CIVS, for lack of a better system, but someone else will write more about that, the next election is not my main concern.
Andreas Raab wrote:
stéphane ducasse wrote:
The same that was in 3.6, 3.7, 3.8.
Which, like I said, is equally bad in this regard.
We proposed a list of points that we would work on and waited for feedback.
Sure. I didn't say there was no feedback, I said there was no transparent decision process. Or put differently, once you had that feedback, who made the decision to include those points and not others in the 3.9a list? To choose X over Y? Based on which authority did that person or group make the decision? And (arguably) most importantly (at least to avoid endless discussions) is there any kind of documentation (links to email threads for example) about the discussion and the decision?
This whole discussion started by an accusation that soms people drive only their personal agenda - and the best to contradict this is to point to the decision process and say "look, here is where discussed this, here is vote/decision process, this is the result and it's explicity documented here for people just like you who don't read Squeak-dev daily and have not been following the discussion closely".
At least contrary to before, the list was explicit.
The previous versions were actually no less explicit if you go over the mailing list archives but they were not as well documented so I see that as a definitive improvement.
Cheers,
- Andreas