On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Ferenc Kovacs <tyr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalys...@sugarcrm.com>wrote: > >> Hi! >> >> > And this is how democracy works, Stas. If voters don't bother to turn >> > up, too bad. >> >> Putting aside the fact that democracy has very little to do with what >> we're trying to do here (we're not government, we're opensource >> project), that's how democracy *doesn't work*. As you noticed, it is >> "too bad", and it is exactly the problem we're having - without >> participation, votes are decided by a random sample of whoever bothered >> to appear, often on a single vote. >> This is not a way to build consensus. It is a very unhealthy state of >> things, and it only contributes to the image of PHP as a project having >> no direction, no governance and basically existing in a state of >> brownian motion. I thought we were trying to shed this image. >> > > To make things a little bit clear. > The members of the 'admin', 'phpcvs', 'voting' groups can vote. > The admin and voting group membership is handed out on case-by-case basis > (although we don't have an open process for that), and the phpcvs group > membership is granted when somebody logs in with a php.net account, so > anybody with a php.net account can vote by default. > Last time when I asked, I was told, that only 3 people has membership of > the voting group(dunno who handed out those), so they don't have a > significant presence in the voting. > Of course if we would actively would handle out accounts to active > community reps and such (which was somehow defined by and accepted with the > voting rfc) you concern could be real given that the active people seems to > be more active than the average person out of the ~3000 people with > php.net account. > > Your other concern, that votes can win by a small margin: > The voting RFC states that syntax or other major changes require 2/3 of > the votes, other changes require simple majority (50%+1 vote). > The minimal discussion period, and minimal voting period was added that > there is enough time for the voters to understand the topic and hand, and > make their votes. > > So we could either raise the required numbers, or the voting time period, > or we could create some arbitary number of minimal votes, but non of those > issues would fix our base problem: the lack of participation of the voters. > Of course, it would prevent us from accepting RFCs without a proper > evaluation, but it could also prevent us from accepting anything. > > I think that the voting rfc itself is a good example of another problem: > accepting RFCs based on the subjective intention, instead of the actual > specification/implementation (or in the voting RFCs case, the lack of clear > specification in some areas). > > Maybe now that we have some experience with the current process we could > create an improved version or an addition to the voting rfc. > What do you think? > > -- > Ferenc Kovács > @Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu > I agree with the theoretical idea, but I don't see any other way to achieve good decision. We can't make peoples participate in the discussions so give peoples a vote without making sure they have good knowledge and they can be "trusted" is not a good thing. The main problem is the lack of participates. Um.. I thought about two ideas, not so good - but they can be improved to be an alternative: - We can try to contact the top popular PHP blogs and websites and request them to publish the discussed idea including all the required knowledge and theory about it and with it publish a poll. taking the results of the poll and add them to the internal poll. You can say that "peoples in this websites don't know well about this" - so we can, for example, divide the poll results by 2 and then add them. - My second idea is to give, in addition to the users who got regular vote permission, a permission to vote in the specific topic if they participate in the discussion - for example, each user who got more than X posts in discussion that contains Y posts can vote too.
