Hi Christofer, I've seen other projects do this and I disagree that it's useful for us to do that on each vote.
First, we are a relatively small community of active committers and typically already aware of who among us is in the PMC and who isn't. Second, aside from a few emeritus PMC members, all our committers are also PMC members. And we have a relatively low barrier to entry. So we only have a handful of active contributors who aren't PMC members at any given time, and we'd notice if they voted, or if somebody we didn't recognize tried to vote. Third, on the rare occasion when a non-committer votes, they usually specify non-binding. Fourth, and most importantly, specifying that a vote is binding doesn't make it binding. What makes it binding is if the voter is a PMC member. If the release manager who tallies the vote isn't already aware of who is a PMC member or not, it would be their responsibility to check, regardless of what the voter said about their own vote, and the tally is subject to review by all for correction. So, specifying it doesn't actually help at all. It just adds noise. I actually think that specifying it is counter productive, because the release manager could start relying on what the user said instead of doing their due diligence to verify when they tally. Speaking frankly, I don't personally find it useful, and I'm most often the one lately who steps up to be a release manager for our votes. I verify every time who is on the PMC list, regardless of what people say in their vote, as I consider it the responsibility of whoever tallies the vote to get an accurate count, and I would do the same to verify the tally if somebody else were to do it. I think this practice of declaring a vote binding is one of those strange customs that has worked its way into some projects because somebody did it once and others copied it without questioning it's value. But I have questioned its value and find it to be without any. As for mentioning it in the RESULT email, if there are both kinds of votes, we do mention the non-binding ones separately. In our last RESULT email, however, I merely said that it "passes with 6 +1s". Since we are aware that only binding votes can cause a vote to pass, it is clearly implied that they were binding. Ultimately, this comes down to trust. If you trust that we tallied the vote correctly, then mentioning they were binding votes is merely redundant. However, if you don't trust that we did it correctly, or just want to double check, then you should not merely accept what we said and should check each vote regardless of what we said, just as you did. In either case, explicitly specifying that they were binding doesn't actually help, I think Regardless, thank you for double checking our tally and for providing this feedback. If it helps, we can try to be more clear in the RESULT emails with some redundancy, but I think it's strange to trust a count more just because of the presence of redundant phrasing. If I were to audit a vote, I'd check the count, regardless of how it was phrased. I also don't think it's useful at all to ask all voters to specify it in their individual votes, for the reasons stated above, especially that it's a potentially harmful custom if the release manager relies on it. Kind regards, Christopher On Sun, Jan 14, 2024, 10:14 Christofer Dutz <cd...@apache.org> wrote: > Hi all, > > while reviewing the project's activity as part of me preparing for the > upcoming board meeting, i noticed that in the last vote thread, there were > only simple +1 votes and no mentions of them being binding votes or not. > Even if this is quite common throughout project, it would be good, if in > the result email they would explicitly be mentioned as binding votes, if > they were counted as such. > > I currently had to check each name with the PMC list in order to check > that they were all actually binding votes. > > Chris > > PS: If you reply to this email, please make sure I'm in CC, as I'm not > subscribed to this list. >
