Decision processes and an RFC

Hilaire Fernandes hilaire at ext.cri74.org
Mon Jan 23 11:01:09 UTC 2006


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
>>
> 


-- 
ADD R0,R1,R2,LSL #2



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