On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 5:15 PM, John D. Ament <johndam...@apache.org> wrote:
> You want > some form of consensus though through the addition of a committer. IF > someone has serious concerns, and is unwilling to change their vote, you > may want to hold off and monitor a bit further to see when that person > passes that threshold to become a committer. You have to have a clear > understanding through the community though to understand why the person > voting -1 feels strongly that way, in addition to not scaring the person > voting into withdrawing their vote - it could be a legitimate issue. > Though ideally, your discussion thread would flesh something like this out. +1 This is a key aspect of Apache community success. We use consensus decision making to avoid tyranny of the majority. Majority rule alienates the losing party. Consensus has beneficial effects in terms of forcing the majority to account for minority opinions, thus keeping the community unified. Most PMCs do not draft their own rules, and just use "at least 3 +1 with no vetoes". CouchDB's majority-rule for committers is unusual. I hope that CouchDB's bylaws are not adopted as a template for others, as I believe that the rule on committer voting is counter to an important institutional tradition in Apache governance. Occasionally you reach an impasse where someone is holding out and consensus cannot be reached. At that point, I've seen communities define a specific supermajority threshold instead of requiring "3 +1 with no vetoes". In the abstract, it would be nice if the supermajority rule were codified on voting.html, giving communities a template for resolving the impasse without thrashing. But ultimately, these votes are not legally binding and PMCs can be afforded a certain amount of flexibility. The Board cares that communities make personnel decisions by consensus, but "consensus" has a little give in it. (PMC votes on new PMC members are technically recommendations to the Board and officially it is the Board that makes decisions on PMC composition -- though the Board nearly always follows the PMC recommendation. Committer votes do not go through the Board.) Marvin Humphrey --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org
