Russ, and others who cared about the issue. I wanted to draw your attention to how I'm proposing to approach who runs the vote for secretary overrides.
In general I'm proposing that the chair of the TC make the decision of who acts as secretary for that vote. The rationale there is that they are the backup secretary for a number of constitutional functions already. I explicitly say that it is fine for them to conduct the vote if it's not a vote to override their decision. First, note if they are acting as secretary for some other reason (secretary is absent without a delegation), it might be their decision subject to override. However, in many cases it will not be their decision, and since they are the backup secretary it seems reasonable for them to conduct the vote. I do not forbid the chair of the TC from decising that the secretary conduct a vote to override the secretary's decision. I actually think there may be some cases where it's generally agreed that the secretary made a decision but doesn't have huge skin in the game. I also do not provide a way to override the decision of who conducts the vote--not even when the TC chair is deciding who handles a vote to override their own decision. It can't be turtles all the way down or five developers could bring everything to a grinding halt proposing to override the person overriding the override of the overriden override. My hope is that especially in a situation where they are involved, the TC Chair will seek input and wait until the project comes up with someone very well respected who hasn't been involved. If they fail to do that, I think replacing the secretary (and/or the TC chair) is a better fix than overriding a single decision. Here's my thinking on the entire matrix of issues here. 1) We could just fall back on being able to replace the secretary. If we don't like what they doing, remove them. I think that's the wrong answer because: 2) The secretary already has a lot of power regarding how votes are conducted. This proposal emphasizes that. It is already clear project members want a clear voice on that. So I want to give them a mechanism to have that voice. (There have been a couple of what to me appeared controversial decisions of the secretary in the past: the decision around the policy delegation and the decision on how the TC doesn't interact with DPL delegated decisions, even when those decisions are technical.) I'll admit I've always been a bit uncomfortable that the project had little recourse if it disagreed with the secretary there. 3) But I'm mostly imagining this mechanism to be used in cases where we have a secretary who is working well, but a single decision needs review by the project. I think it is reasonable to trust everyone involved to be acting in what they see as the project's best interest. If there are doubts of that nature, I think changing staff is best. So, I don't want to go over board with the paranoia. That said, recent world politics have reminded me that sometimes these corner cases around change of power matter. Here are other options I could support: * Explicitly say that you can never conduct a vote regarding overriding a decision you made. * Introducing some mechanism to choose who conducts a vote to override a decision of the TC chair acting as secretary. I don't know who to pick though; DPL is a bad choice because of their power to introduce a GR. * Give up on the whole thing and fall back to replacing the secretary if there is a problem. I'd rank that above FD, but I'd prefer the current proposal. I'd appreciate any thoughts on this.
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