Decision processes and an RFC

Daniel Vainsencher daniel.vainsencher at gmail.com
Tue Jan 24 22:21:28 UTC 2006


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.

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
> 



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