[Elections] Re: Who votes? how does voting work?

[Lex Spoon]

It's barely possible that the Squeak People designations look strange to
me simply because all of the people I am thinking of really have left
Squeak.  But let me take one more stab at showing you how strange it
looks to me.  Here are the people I posted before, this time with
annotations.  None of them will be allowed to vote if we "just use
SqueakPeople".  Don't you guys agree that leaving these people out is
rather bizare?


	Mark Guzdial, who wrote PWS and PWS/Swiki, who taught a
	Squeak-based university class to thousands of people over
	the years, who sponsored several Squeak-based Ph.D. projects,
	who authored a text book based on Squeak, and who co-edited
	the nu blue book.
	
	
	Bolot Karimbaev, author of Comanche.
	
	
	Alan Kay.
	
	
	KK Lamberty, a Ph.D. student who did the DigiQuilt project in Squeak.
	
	
	John Maloney, who among many other things brought Morphic to
	Squeak, gave Squeak a sound infrastructure, and is now working
	on the Scratch project.
	
	
	Jeff Pearce, who brought "Alice" to Squeak.
	
	
	Jeff Rick, who put many hours into building and refining
	ComSwiki, and who has put in years of scholarly work on
	wikis.
	
	
	Kim Rose, who has been with Squeak Central since the beginning,
	is a major player at ViewPoints, who co-edited the nublue book with
	Mark Guzdial.
	
	
	Jim Rowan, a Ph.D. student who did multiple projects in Squeak.
	
	
	Nathanael Shaerli, who gave Squeak the Genie gesture-recognition
	system and who worked out the traits system of restricted multiple
	inheritance.


Instead of rejecting all of these guys, here is a proposal based on the
previously posted list of Squeak-based criteria.

For the first round of membership, let people apply on a Wiki page and
post their reason for being considered a member.  Objections and
requests for more information can be posted in Wiki style.  After a
month or so, I expect that a consensus will emerge on practically all
applicants (and, in fact, likely 100% of them will be included), and
that will be the initial membership.

This seems easier, on the whole, than trying to invigorate the entire
community to actually take part on Squeak People.


For later rounds of membership, I propose the same kind of thing, except
that instead of having public review, we have one person in the group
review them carefully and then post their findings publically somewhere.
 If no one objects after a certain period of time (one month?), then a
person can then be included in the Squeak club with full privilages.

Again, this seems easier on the whole than trying to get people to
maintain their Squeak People ratings.

For referenda, limiting who can propose them means that power gets
rather centralized.  Allowing resolutions to be proposed by anyone is a
helpful check against the leadership getting carried away against the
wishes of the group.  Instead of defining an inner circle and using that
to limit referenda proposals, how about requiring proposed referenda to
be seconded?  There are easy ways to avoid trivial referenda if that
becomes a problem, but once power is centralized it is really hard to
move in the opposite direction.

Daniel's non-functional requirements look excellent to me.  We can use
public text files to get going, even though it unfortunately means that
votes are all public.  For later rounds, PGP looks good.  The PGP spec
is public, and we happen to have all the required encryption algorithms.

Hmm, by the way.  4 out of 5 of the listed authors of our cryptography
module are not included on Squeak People.  Thus, it isn't only *my*
collaborators who would be left out by "just use Squeak People".


-Lex