On 1/10/16 8:15 AM, Dennis Birkholz wrote: > I would really like to understand the rational behind anonymous voting > in the PHP internals context. Votes for RFCs should be purely based on > technical reasons and whether the language change would benefit the > language in the long run or not. I see no reason why such a vote > should be confidential.
I will chime in my quick thoughts here Dennis, as to a reason I could see for doing so ... (Not going to argue if 'this reason is good enough' or not. But it is a valid reason) > If a person does not stand behind his/her opinion for a technical > change, I am not sure if that person should be allowed to decide the > future of the language. So the reason is not because someone isn't willing to 'stand behind their opinion'. It's purely about being harassed (perhaps beleaguered is a better terminology to not confuse this with 'illegal harassment') for having said opinion. I was one of the people who, due to my vote on STH, immediately started being beleaguered for holding my views and for voting as much. My inbox/twitter/IRC/etc filled with how I was ruining PHP and ruining people's lives. Old friendships were threatened to be ended. And my entire week ended up becoming full of responding to these. Instead of getting to be an informed voter, go in and cast my vote, and await for the results to be displayed ... I become embroiled into the arguments, back-n-forth, defense, and dealing with the beleaguering comments. Yes, I stood behind my opinion. But it has made me gun shy about voting in the future on any contentious topic, because I know I need to set aside the time to 'deal with that'. Yet those contentious topics, are the ones where we should be encouraging as many people as possible to vote, to make sure that we have a broad spectrum of views and that it is the 'will of the community' as it were. And (at least in the US) is against the idea in general of voter confidence. Where you are free to hold your belief without needing to be slammed for it publicly. So anyway, that's one reason. Whether it's a good reason or not is up to others to decide. > ... But it may be preferable to hide the Person<->Vote table until the > vote is over. That would provide protection against harassment to win > someone over and change his/her vote. Unfortunately that won't stop the above situation. While it would stop the idea of campaigning someone to change their vote (which is perhaps another reason to do it). It just means all the above issues would be taking place post-vote, instead of during-vote. Eli -- | Eli White | http://eliw.com/ | Twitter: EliW |
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
