> On Aug 19, 2020, at 16:27, Benjamin Morel <benjamin.mo...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi internals, > > The heated debate about attribute syntax made me think once again that it > would be valuable to get feedback in the form of votes from the community, > not just from core developers, on RFCs under discussion. > > Understandably, the RFC voting process needs to be restricted to carefully > selected people, mostly core developers. But the fact is, this process is a > bit elitist, and fails to represent the community as a whole. A recent > thread <https://externals.io/message/111552> showed that even very active > contributors to OSS are unlikely to ever get a vote. > > A project being nothing without its users, it would be nice to know whether > an important change will make them happy or not. > > Therefore, I have in mind to develop (time permitting) an experimental > tool, external to the PHP wiki, that would replicate the voting options of > each RFC, but would allow everyone with a GitHub account to vote on the > same options as the original RFC. While the vote results would not directly > affect the wiki's vote results, I guess that this community feedback could > be taken into consideration by wiki voters and help them make an informed > decision. > > To be useful, a link to the community voting site would need to be present > in each RFC, ideally some time before the actual voting starts on the wiki. > > If popular enough, this tool could offer some analysis capabilities, such > as "what's the vote results from people having at least 100 commits to the > top 1000 packagist projects in the last year?" to help filter out the noise. > > Thoughts?
I think there’s already a fair amount of community representation on this list, and while there are sometimes criticisms levied at internals, such as “internals doesn’t use PHP” or “internals doesn’t understand what the rest of the PHP community wants,” I think these are false or mistaken. A lot of the folks who have voting privileges and who actively participate in voting on RFCs are already what some might call “at-large” community representatives. Those on this list who have wider community networks often seek feedback on RFCs from their network. None of this is done in a vacuum. It’s all fairly transparent, and if non-voting members want to provide input, they have various ways to do so (e.g., posting here, giving feedback to someone who is active here, etc.). That said, I never want to discourage more involvement from the wider community, but I think something like what you’re proposing needs to be handled carefully. I think it would need to be clear that this is not a binding *vote*. Rather, it’s an informal *poll* to gauge support/interest in something. People who do have RFC voting privileges are not obligated to vote one way or another based on the results of the poll. In the end, it may be best if an informal poll like this is conducted by a third-party who does not have RFC voting privileges (so that they could be considered neutral and unrelated to internals). This way, there’s no confusion over the purpose of the poll, and it is simply information that may be shared with internals but is not officially sanctioned by the PHP project. There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing this right now. :-) Cheers, Ben
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