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

Wed Jul 18 20:50:49 EDT 2018

[can I just say how much I've missed having both you and Tim around, Alex?
😃]

On Wed, Jul 18, 2018, 17:28 Alex Martelli via python-committers, <
python-committers at python.org> wrote:

> There are plenty of precedents for mandatory voting, but the enforcement
> mechanisms (if any) appear not to be applicable to our case. Note the "if
> any": several countries declare voting a citizen's duty (in their
> Constitution or otherwise) but don't actually enforce this duty in any way.
> For example, that's the case in the United States: if you apply for
> naturalization you will be quizzed on many things, including "what are the
> duties of a citizen", and one of the latter is "participate in the
> democratic process" which includes voting -- but if you don't, no
> enforcement action is taken against you. In contrast, if you get a jury
> summons (jury duty being another of those citizen duties) and repeatedly
> fail to show up, you may end up in jail -- now THAT is enforcement of the
> duty (and no Python community organism has, nor should have, such power of
> enforcement.
>

And that lack of enforcement power is what makes me worry about mandatory
participation to make a vote considered legitimate.

> In Italy, where voting is declared to be a duty in the Constitution, at
> the start of the Republic you'd get (until next election) a stamp of "non
> ha votato" ("did not vote") in your publicly accessible judiciary record
> (it would come up in any background search -- and, in a country where
> firing employees was notoriously hard, some opined that such a flaw might
> be grounds for dismissal if the employer so wished, although I've never
> heard of it happening). That was abolished 25 years ago, in part because it
> was randomly/capriciously enforced (many judicial districts were too
> otherwise-busy to go through voting records and apply/remove the stamp!-).
> So, now, Italy is in the vast camp of countries declaring voting a duty
> (Italy's constitution was not changed on this subject) but not enforcing
> the "duty" at all (indeed, failing to show up to vote is now often
> advocated by adversaries of referendums, which have a 50% minimum
> participation threshold to be valid and may well be easier to defeat by
> getting people to just not show up -- since many others won't anyway for
> other reasons -- than by getting them to vote against).
>
> Since I originally brought up a parallel between "which BDFL" voting, and
> a Papal conclave, I would be remiss to fail to mention that since 1274 the
> Cardinals are locked up "with a key" ("cum clave") until a Pope does get
> elected -- usually a good-enough incentive to vote (though once the
> citizens of the town where the conclave was held had to decide after a few
> failed votes to only send in bread and water -- and later, said citizens
> removed the roof of the palace where the Cardinals were locked up, hoping
> that rain may speed up the proceedings). Colorful, but, again, not really
> applicable in our case.
>
> What's left? The "public naming and shaming" Italy used until a quarter
> century ago might work -- just make a little site listing the committers
> who, while having a right to vote, haven't voted (yet). A VERY long voting
> period might also help -- amendments to the US Constitution originally had
> unlimited times for ratification (the 27th amendment, originally the 2nd
> one proposed in 1789, was ratified 202 years after proposal), though these
> days 7 years is a more customary time limit for ratification. Not sure if
> these are good ideas.
>
> Another possibility is to avoid having separate thresholds for
> participation and approval (US constitution amendments work that way --
> with the specifics being a threshold only for approval out of all States,
> not how many States have voted for or against). I.e, if we decide 2/3 is
> OK, a proposal might be approved if 2/3 of *eligible* voters have voted
> for it -- no matter how many of the remaining 1/3 have voted against, or
> not (yet?) voted at all (since, if 100% of eligible voters could be
> bothered to vote, once the proposal gets 2/3 of the votes in favor, it does
> not matter whether the remaining 1/3 vote against, abstain, or whatever).
> This is not mutually exclusive with other ideas (of which, out of what I've
> mentioned, the viable ones -- though not necessarily wise! -- would be
> "public naming" of non-voters, and VERY long voting periods).
>

That is a good point of clarification. If we did super-majority, is it of
all counted *votes* or all possible *voters*? We might be surprised by the
participation levels, or we might be disappointed. So we might have to go
on what we think is reasonable, try it, and if there's a threshold
requirement then be prepared to have to vote again (and again ...) until
the threshold is met (or we lower the threshold 😁).

Another bit of concrete numbers: to get 84 people (roughly 2/3 of 91) to
have made a commit you have look back 7 years of commit history (that will
include non-core folks and those who don't have privileges anymore).

> Lastly, I suspect two votes should be separated: (1) what model we adopt
> (BDFL, ruling triumvirate, whatever); (2) the model having been chosen, WHO
> is going to serve (as BDFL, as triumvirate member, and so on)...
>

I'm assuming that's how we will want to structure it as probably any of
these proposals will specify how someone(s) will be chosen.

-Brett

>
> Alex
>
> On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 3:46 PM 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.
>>
>> >
>> > If you feel like this is unrealistic because most of our committers
>> aren't currently active, I hear you. But what I like even less is claiming
>> that "we, the core team" made a decision when, say, just 35% of us voted.
>> In such case it would be easier for those of us who disagree to claim the
>> decision doesn't really represent the views of the greater core team.
>> >
>>
>>
>>
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