On 5/25/13 10:19 AM, Ryan Newton wrote:

I'm a refugee from Scheme-istan. Most important to me are not the specific technical outcomes, but that a sense of community cohesiveness survives, avoiding, for example the post-R6RS affair (divergent R7Rs, Racket split).

I'm not a Schemer, but I definitely sympathize. FWIW, I've always considered the +1/-1 posts to be more along the lines of reddit; i.e., I dis-/like this proposal but don't have anything substantial to add. However, more recently, the +1/-1 posts have tended to come across as something more like "voting" ...which, as others have mentioned, is problematic at best. I've worked with a few consensus-based nonprofits and co-ops, so I have some feel for the complexities involved in establishing official decision mechanisms, whether they be voting-based or consensus-based. So far, we've gotten by pretty well with the benevolent dictator model of just feeling the community out and then doing stuff. But I wonder if the community has gotten too large for this to continue, which may be why the feeling behind +1/-1 posts has been shifting towards this terminology of "voting". That could also explain why (IMHO) some of the discussions on this list have been getting more contentious--- in voting models people tend to feel like they need to shout louder in order to be heard, while simultaneously feeling like they have less and less of a say in the outcome (which leads to shouting of another sort). This is all just vague musing at the moment. I've always enjoyed the friendliness and conscientiousness of the Haskell community, and it'd be nice to keep that. But maybe it is time to move to a more official mechanism of decision making; if so, then what sort of mechanism do we want? Simon has suggested an extension of the benevolent dictator model, with a small committee making the final call. I've always been a fan of consensus methods since they do a good job of airing different perspectives and coming to decisions that don't fracture the community or encourage partisanship. Most of us are familiar with voting models of various sorts. Each of these models has its ups and downs; regardless, it's something to think about before just picking one. -- Live well, ~wren