I think we have a problem with the way the current vote came about. [ I'm cross-posting this, because it seems that people managed to miss what is going on what with messages being spread across debian-vote, and debian-publicity. Please follow up to -publicity]
>From talking to people over the weekend at the UKUUG Linux conference, I get the impression that there is a consensus that the plain swirl is nicer that the with-bottle-swirl, and that if we must have two logos, then it would be better to have the plain-swirl in the widest possible use (because it's nicer). If that's true, then we should be discussing it, rather than going to a vote with practically no discussion whatsoever. Decision making in Debian has always previously been based on consensus, even if the consensus was simply ``We should vote on it''. In this case, I seen no evidence that there was a consensus for a vote, so I'm not convinced that there will be any validity to the result. >From reading the archives again, it seems that events happened like this: Branden mentioned the vote idea (not sure which list). I objected because (IIRC) it was too specific, and should allow for other possibilities (such as alternatives that Raul could come up with). Branden resubmitted his unchanged proposal to debian-vote and debian-publicity A bunch of people seconded it. Later, on -publicity, Adam Di Carlo said that we shouldn't be voting on this in the first place. Raul followed up by saying that he agreed that discussions should continue on -publicily, for a final decision, and that he'd come up with some more versions of the logo. Witchert said that in that case, he was against the logo swap. Then nothing more was said, as far as I can see. In the old days, that would have been the end of it, until we heard back form Raul, but now we get automatically bulldozered into a vote, despite the fact that there seems to be no consensus that we should even have a vote. The trouble is, that I think the majority of the people voting for ``Swap'' are actually voting for ``Use the swirl, and forget the bottle'', which is something different. I can see this sort of thing happening again --- we need to stop people proposing votes before there has been a chance to build a consensus (without a vote). Otherwise the minority of people who can be bothered to vote, will be able to push through all sorts of drivel. Do the right thing, and vote ``Further Discussion'' now! Cheers, Phil.
