[python-committers] Proposal on how to vote (was: An alternative governance model)

[Brett Cannon]

On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 at 15:46 Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jul 18, 2018, at 6:18 PM, Łukasz Langa <lukasz at langa.pl> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> On Jul 18, 2018, at 4:56 PM, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> While I am totally fine with a super-majority of votes for something to
> be accepted, I don't think the minimum participation requirement will work.
> If people simply choose not to vote then they choose not to (we have no way
> to really compel people to vote).
> >
> > It could be easily added to the list of things expected from a core
> contributor. It's not like this is a laborious chore, neither is it
> happening often. There are countries where voting is mandatory.
>
> Given that we don’t have a lot of levers in our tool chest to compel
> voting, what would you propose we do if we get only a 35% participation
> rate? We can’t drag people to the polls, the most we can really do is
> either keep running elections and hope you hit whatever threshold you
> decide on, or you start removing people who can vote until you’ve removed
> enough people that the people who are participating now make up whatever
> your target participation rate is.
>
> The first choice there strikes me as unrealistic. Hope is not a strategy,
> and I fail to see why repeatedly offering the same vote multiple times is
> likely to increase the participation rate. In fact, I think it’s likely to
> decease it as people get tired of having to do it over again and just start
> giving up and viewing it as noise.
>
> The second choice seems… dishonest to me? You’re not really increasing the
> participation of the vote, you’re just juicing the numbers to make the
> participation rate higher. It’s selectively defining who is eligible to
> vote to make the numbers look better.
>
> Is there another option I’m missing to compel people to vote?
>
> >
> > Taking a step back, there are two reasons I stress the importance of
> (almost) everybody voicing their support:
> > - this makes the decision authoritative ("the committers have spoken”);
>
> I think this is largely a non-issue. In the US we do not have mandatory
> elections, and I don’t see very many people challenging the authority of
> said elections due to the large percentage of non-voters. The most I
> generally see if people scolding those who don’t vote.
>
> > - this ensures that we haven't omitted somebody due to poor timing ("I
> was on a sabbatical and couldn't vote”).
>
> Unless you require 100% voting participation, it doesn’t ensure this, it
> just makes it less likely. If you target 90%, then a full 10% of the people
> could have been excluded due to poor timing.
>
> I don’t think it’s possible to fully eliminate this risk, but I think the
> best possible way of handling it is to advertise the vote well in advance,
> and allow the vote itself to take place over a reasonable amount of time.
> The more advance notice, and the larger the window of time is to actually
> vote in, the less likely timing becomes an issue. Just to pluck some random
> times out of the air, if you advertise the voting for 3 months and allow
> voting to happen any time in a months time, that gives people a full 4
> months they will have to be completely unavailable to have no idea the
> voting is happening, and be unable to access a computer for a handful of
> minutes to actually do the vote at all in a month.
>

I think this is a reasonable way to deal with the situation.

We will also need to see how many proposals we have and how similar they
are, else we might have to talk about ranked ballot.
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