[squeak-dev] Re: keeping arrow for assignment operator
Phil (list)
pbpublist at gmail.com
Fri Mar 13 03:42:25 UTC 2009
On Mar 12, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:
> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>> This community doesn't even have a consensus on the way to make
>> decisions. These are not my words, but they say what I think:
>> "Historically, decisions have been made by the people screaming the
>> loudest or the longest. We need to work out a way to fix this and
>> to come to a process by which we can make decisions that are
>> acceptable to the community at large." Only when there is a process
>> set up to make decisions, and it is applied to issues like this,
>> you can say there is consensus. This has not happened yet. And I do
>> really hope it will happen this year.
>
> Me too. I'll even go out on a limp here and attempt to make a
> proposal: I think that in most situations both sides of an issue
> honestly believe that their opinion is the majority opinion. And
> that both sides cannot possibly fathom the idea that their view
> might be a vanishingly small minority opinion, where the opposing
> party pretty much sees that as a given.
>
> So perhaps a starting point is to try to replace screaming with
> getting a better picture about what the opinions on an issue really
> are. In other words, for potentially controversial issues we (the
> board) could organize a poll if there is an actionable proposal on
> the table. The board could then use the result of the poll as a
> guide to see whether to approve the proposal or not.
>
> How do people feel about this? Would this be an acceptable way to
> come to a conclusion? The idea is that someone *will* make a
> decision (the board) but only if there is a concrete proposal on the
> table which necessitates the decision, guided by the community
> opinion. It doesn't mean that all proposals get polled but for the
> controversial ones I think this could really help both sides
> understand whether or not the (mostly silent) majority agrees with
> them or not.
>
> Cheers,
> - Andreas
>
What you are describing is basically a proposal->comment period-
>voting process that seems like a sensible way to proceed. Though
you might want to think about having the board always making a call
(unless it's absolutely necessary that some action be taken) in the
event of a split vote (and what constitutes a majority opinion)... if
there is no clear consensus and nothing *needs* to be done, sometimes
no action is the right course.
Thanks,
Phil
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