Jonathan Revusky wrote:
Well, have you considered the positional issues I raised in the earlier
post? The order in which people vote is quite important. Offhand, here
is an idea:
You know, I meant to address that and I completely forgot :) I think
you do raise a valid issue. I'm not really sure how to solve it...
simple anonymous vote seems the best answer, but how do you pull that
off? If you have a webapp specially for people to vote, someone could
always accuse you of "cooking" the code :) That is I think one of the
reasons most projects go with a public vote on a list, and I tend to agree.
Maybe you should have a vote that is non-binding among the simple users.
Effectively if most users are against something, then the idea is not
immediately rejected, but it is indicative of a need for more debate. If
most users are in favor, then you could move on to the committers voting
and so on.
The problem is that once the people higher on your pecking order, your
PMC, vote +1, this will bias the votes of the lower status people.
(Also, the PMC are the people who are -- hopefully -- more involved and
are likely to put in their votes with less delay.) The results of the
voting is bound to be highly dependent on the order in which voting
takes place, don't you think?
Yes, I do agree it is a concern. I'm not sure I would say it is
*highly* dependent on order, but I *do* think it comes into play.
Well, I just proposed a few changes to the bylaws on the JWP mailing
list, and I wish I hadn't forgotten about this point because I would
have tried to address it too. I have to think about it a bit and try
and find a decent solution, I'm not sure what it might be at the moment.
Your intent is good, but I am skeptical that all this formalized voting
is really the way open source projects should work. I'm not saying I
have all the alternatives figured either.
You know, it's funny, but a few years ago I was quite the anti-open
source guy :) I've definitely changed my thinking on some things over
the years. One of the things I *haven't* changed my mind about though
is the need for more formality. I don't believe that *some* rigidity
and *some* project management methodologies is incompatible with the
idea of community development. Obviously you can't take it too far, but
I'm trying to figure out where the line is :)
If nothing else, I prefer being up-front with people, and I don't want
there to be any mystery in the process. The voting system may be
somewhat unwieldly, and I in no way think it's perfect, but I would
prefer that to having to figure out how to do a vote every time one
comes up :)
Jonathan Revusky
Frank
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Frank W. Zammetti
Founder and Chief Software Architect
Omnytex Technologies
http://www.omnytex.com
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Yahoo: fzammetti
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