Hi again, I have serious concerns with the current situation.
What is wrong with the current call for vote ? Let me summarize the situation : - An obscure group of self-appointed people wrote a text, they had the possibility to discuss and amend its content, with an unlimited amount of time. The estimated entropy of the text is larger than 1. - This text can not be modified by the community and is submitted as is for a majority vote. Those that do not belong to the obscure group (which is still anonymous after various requests) can therefore only contribute 1/n bits, where n is the number of voters. They have less than two days to answer. My point of view about this : - This is paternalistic because it means that the community as a whole is not able to work together and write anything good. This looks also useless (or dangerous?) to take more time and let people think and exchange about this. - This contradicts the contents of the text which claims about collaboration and respect, however it is not how the obscure group behaves. Hence, i doubt that the text will be used in other way than for repression. - This is in complete contradiction with Sage community habits. Let me give an example: when someone writes some code, anyone can help during the review process. If one of the reviewers thinks something can be improved, it is discussed on trac, modifications are made until everyone agree. We are all pointing toward a common goal. Discussing some big issues on sage-devel is a way to involve more people in important design discussions and mix more ideas together, it is not a way to enforce the approval by a majority vote. There are strong issues with majority voting : - A call for vote aims at closing a discussion. However, if there is an issue somewhere, the only way to reach a stable solution is precisely to let the discussion open until enough content is added into it and try to merge good ideas and objections. Regarding the current proposition, some objections were emitted by various people. - Launching such a vote creates a division within the community, whatever the outcome, between those who belong to the "majority" and the others. This will result in oppression: the minority will have to behave according to what the majority decided. - It is easy to raise an army of voters, especially on a public mailing-list. It can be as innocent as sending e-mails to people that are likely to agree with you and say "there is a vote going on, you should read it and make your own opinion". - This is unlikely to attract future developers with diverse and original points of view and autonomous thinking. - If the text is voted, the minority will have to conform to a text they could not even discuss. This is even more serious that the text is about individual behaviour. Was there with a particular minority in mind ? Choosing among ideas or mixing them ? Competition or Collaboration ? Fight or Solidarity ? This e-mail is not ended, i encourage you to read and think about "majority voting" and "consensus decision making". We have a serious communication issue, and we need to discuss it, without deadline. Following the previous thread, Vincent opened a page for this on the wiki. Ciao, Thierry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
