Well, I agree in general, unsurprisingly! Votes are needed to legitimize things and to provide accountability. This in turn gives the people in charge a vital communication line to the people they represent. In turn, voting requires defining who gets to vote.
My only reservation about using a reputation system to grant voting rights. It is true that using Squeak People's reputation system would be objective and simple, albeit mysterious. If we lack alternatives then that's what we should go for. However, after a little experimentation, I see that SqueakPeople does not capture the people I think of as the Squeak community!
What I did was to use Google to search for some Squeak people I have collaborated with. The following people, happily, have accounts on the site:
Marcus Denker Stephane Ducasse Josh Gargus Ted Kaehler Dan Ingalls Andreas Raab Scott Wallace
On the other hand, the following people don't even have an account. They aren't merely ranked incorrectly. As far as SP is concerned, they do not exist!
Mark Guzdial Bolot Karimbaev Alan Kay KK Lamberty John Maloney Jeff Pearce Jeff Rick (in fact, no "Jeff"'s at all!) Kim Rose Jim Rowan Nathanael Shaerli
Aside from theoretical issues, our best reputation system in practice does not seem to define a very good set of voters. I think we would all agree that the people in the second list ought to get votes....
Here's an alternative for people to chew on. How about defining the initial voting group as anyone who meets one of the following criteria?
1 posted code to a Squeak bug tracker 2 posted to squeak-dev 3 made 1000 lines of Squeak code publically available 4 assembled an etoy with at least 3 lines of script in it 5 published a paper based on Squeak 6 gave a talk to 5+ people based on Squeak
How does this list sound as the crowd that gets voting rights?
-Lex