On Fri, 02 Jan 2009, MJ Ray wrote: > Sorry - I'm with Wouter Verhelst on this. Having options on the > ballot that only a small minority of DDs support can help resolve > conflicts: it lays them to rest, demonstrating they fail in the > wider DD population,
If an option can't get seconds enough to pass K (or Q), it doesn't have support in the DD population or the proposers are lazy, and don't want to find enough support. In either case, people's time shouldn't be wasted with the effort required to run a vote and vote in it. > rather than the DDs supporting them being able to blame the > self-selecting subset who participate on debian-vote. If DDs who support them are unable to gather enough seconds via -vote, nothing stops them from finding other people who support the proposal using other methods. Furthermore, there are at least 103 DDs subscribed to -vote[1], so arguments about some self-selecting subset are a bit misplaced (not that that'll stop them from being made.) > Even if the number of seconds for a proposal is raised to something > massive like 2Q, would it be worth keeping the number of seconds for > a partial amendment at K? If we're going to have the trouble of > votes, we might as well vote as comprehensively as possible... Additional options on a ballot means that voters have to spend additional time to process the option and differentiate it between all other options. When multiplied by the number of people who vote, that becomes a non-trivial waste of voter's time for options which couldn't find enough seconders who actually support the option. If an option can't get enough seconds from people who support that option to satisfy K (or even Q), not enough people support it for it to have a chance of being supported by a majority of people in an election that meets quorum. Don Armstrong 1: 102 subscriptions with @debian.org$ addresses, anyway. (For comparison, there are 147 subscribed to -devel, 112 to -project, and 324 to d-d-a.) I've no clue about actual DD readership or whether people actually read it or /dev/null it. Maybe they use it in place of almanacs in their out buildings. -- Three little words. (In descending order of importance.) I love you -- hugh macleod http://www.gapingvoid.com/graphics/batch35.php http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
