Berin Loritsch wrote:
Stephen McConnell wrote:
Your going to consider me really picky - but what the hell - it is important. What we *need* is agreement by the PMC members on a charter and as things stand today - and that is basically a majority opinion of the elected PMC members until such time that we declare charter modification as something special under a set of PMC by-laws. And, yes - it would *nice* to have PMC member concensus, even community concensus - but these attributes are not obligations on the PMC members and do not impact the decision procedure.
Stephen, what is the biggest problem with the Avalon community? Just that, the community. The thing is that we the community have to come up with the bylaws that run our community. If the community is not happy with the bylaws that the PMC sets up by blind majority, they will go elsewhere. I think it is more important at this juncture to get the community on board and forget about your pet agenda.
Berin:
Lets take a step back for a moment and look at what we are both attempting to achieve.
You want to make sure that the process under which the
PMC makes decisions cannot be abused through rushing of
something then results in a majority decision, and becomes
law. I think (and I'm sure you will agree with this) that
PMC decisions will be on important issues, and such we must
ensure that there is a process that ensures adequate
discussion and representation. You have raised the vote to
recommend the formation of an Avalon PMC as an example of
the type of process that you consider inappropriate. Your
issue is the timeframe for the vote - in the case of the
PMC vote that was 72 hours. I agree with you that PMC
voting processes should be longer then this.
I want to make sure the procedures that are put in place
for PMC decision making cannot be used a single individual
to hold up the will of majority.
There is another aspect concerning the process we employ to achieve resolution of the above points.
You priority is to ensure that the whatever we establish,
it is based on the consensus of this community. This is a
position I am completely supportive on. My disagreement above
was on the grounds of a conflict between the "standing
procedure" the PMC has today, and what was implied by your
earlier email that suggested the adoption of committer
procedures for handling the work on charter and procedures. While I am totally with you on the principal of a total
consensus based process, I think it is equally important
that we respect the rules that exist (even if we don't like
them) just as we will respect future procedures that we
establish.
I think we can achieve community consensus on a set of policies
and procedures - and once that is achieved, the PMC will have
to vote on something using the existing PMC procedures.
Back to the discussion on procedures for the PMC. Based on the emails so far, it seems to me that there are a three proposals that meet both our objectives.
Noel has suggested a majority voting process that is based on
the Board process that includes the notion of quorum based on
Apache bylaws Section 5.8. Quorum and Voting (i.e. 50% of
PMC members).
You have also suggested a qualified majority (2/3) process that
also includes the notion of a quorum. In an earlier email you
referenced quorum in relation to Apache bylaws Section 3.9
dealing with general members (i.e. 33% of the PMC).
A third proposal from Sam Ruby is based on auto-PMC-membership,
majority voting rules and presumably a fixed quorum of 3.
The difference between the first two is subtle - the benefit of increasing the quorum is that it ensures "representation" - the downside is related to availability of members. The impact of "majority" as opposed to "qualified majority" favors consensus. Of the two, I think I prefer your proposal. The third proposal is interesting because it ensures representation and in general makes life simpler (it is also possibly my favorite out of the three). However - to properly included the third proposal would need to set the timeframe for voting to be something like a week instead of 72 hours.
Cheers, Steve.
--
Stephen J. McConnell
OSM SARL
digital products for a global economy
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.osm.net
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