Re: Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

On 11/8/10 10:04 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

On 8 November 2010 08:06, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

...

An Apache-style vote system for resolving points of disagreement, so that we can move past them reasonably swiftly instead of going in endless morale-sapping circles. This is particularly important to me. I'd really have liked to be able to say "we discussed this, it's over" about naming, but instead I feel that objectors held, in effect, a veto. The current consensus system seems to require complete agreement from all parties, which seems perverse.

I'll raise this with the steering committee. Voting is something we tried to avoid in the process when we first designed it, but the intention was always to see how things went and review. Voting may be a useful thing to bring in at some points if there's a clear case that some decision is better than no decision. If we decide to add this to the process my view would be that it should be only used occasionally for specific issues, perhaps issues of general principle rather than specific issues in a proposal (obviously Text brought up a couple of those).

I don't know much about Apache's system, but I think it would be good to have something like this considered as an informal show of hands, rather than as voting per se. (Perhaps my idea belongs more to the previous bullet point than this one.) There are good reasons to want to avoid voting, but I think a good deal of the repetition in discussing things was due to a lack of some more permanent means of people just specifying how they feel about some given topic. -- Live well, ~wren