Replying to https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-community/2016-August/000127.html (I can't reply properly otherwise as I just subscribed):
2) This really just boils down to the political gridlock between HP and Stack. Unless the actual parties involved in that gridlock can hammer out an actual decision directly, why have an obscure vote on an obscure mailing list? Such an act comes off as clandestine.
As per: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee the list serves as a forum for the committee, which is the historical body in charge of haskell.org and its subdomains, to discuss actions under its purview with a broader group of interested people.
There is no polling mechanism as such — the committee is empowered to act, but this forum was created as a way to ensure that people had a single unified venue to discuss publically such actions.
It was announced both to haskell-cafe as well as the reddit at the time of its creation.
If the poll was announced there, there would still be extra friction. But IIUC only the mailing list was announced there.
We can’t expect committee members to follow discussions all over reddit/twitter/etc nor can we expect such discussions to archive well and uniformly so we have a future record.
If you want to have a poll over a mailing list, what about e.g. haskell-cafe? Or naming any other place where more people have access? I might understand the concern about archiving, but haskell-cafe solves that. And "the committee can't be expected to follow discussions" and "is empowered to act" does sound like "the committee can't be expected to listen to the community". Cheers, -- Paolo G. Giarrusso - Ph.D. Student, Tübingen University http://ps.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/team/giarrusso/