On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu <[email protected]> wrote:
> Short story: > > A Veto carries a lot of power [1], and it brings imbalance to a > supposedly democratic process. For normal votes, especially those that > ask for opinions, not for validation of a critical decision, a -1 should > count as a normal vote. In this case, an actual Veto should be marked as > such. Proposals: > > A. Keep -1 as a Veto, but require the voter to really justify the veto > with technical reasons. If the vetoer fails to convince other of his > reasons, and the majority still agrees with the proposal, then the veto > can be discarded, and the vote passes. > > B. Separate -1 from Veto. A -1, by default, counts just as a vote > against the proposal, and the majority will rule. An actual Veto must be > marked as such, but the vetoer must bring very good reasons for the veto. > IMO this separation is already done by '-0' and '-1'. I've seen that in [1] we don't mention what '-0' means but we've used a lot in the past and you explained it very well in an example below. Also from what I remember, every time someone votes '-' he explained why he did that. True that maybe we used more '-1' instead of using '-0' but we could change this by explaining their purpose more. > > C. Just keep things as they are now, since you think that the current > process has worked well so far, and nobody abused the right to veto. > I don't have any problems with the way we held our votes until now, but I didn't submitted many votes. > > > Long story: > > The right to Veto a VOTE means that just one participant can block a > whole vote, even though the vast majority thinks otherwise. This is a > very powerful right, and I for one tried to avoid using it as much as > possible: in general I use -0 for solutions that I don't particularly > like, but for which I don't have an actual better solution, or an > universally acceptable reason that can convince everybody else of my > decision. > > It makes sense to have the Veto power, as a way to spotlight serious > problems with a proposal. The expected outcome in this situation is for > the vote sender to understand and accept the outcome, and go back to > redesigning the proposed solution, fixing the problems exposed. > > But when votes are just about opinions, and about choosing the version > that most people like, it is hard to say that one opinion is more > important than others and it can rightly prevent reaching a conclusion. > This is particularly true about UI design and UX, but also about voting > on processes and rules. > > One possible outcome is that votes (and the proposals being voted) get > deadlocked, blocking progress. The rules say that the proponent should > review and change the proposal and restart the vote. Sometimes the > effort put into the original proposal is considered big enough, and if > the vetoer failed to convince the proponent of the problems, there won't > be any more work put into the proposal, and it will just die. I'm not > saying that this happens too often, but it does from time to time, at > least for me. > > > So, I think that the Veto power should be used sparingly. I see two > options: > > A. Keep -1 as a Veto, but require the voter to really justify the veto > with technical reasons. Currently, the rules say that the vote sender > must try to convince the vetoer about the rationale of the voted > proposal. It should also be the other way around: if the majority agrees > with the proposal, the vetoer should try to convince the others why the > proposal is bad. If the vetoer fails to do that, and the majority still > agrees with the proposal, then the veto can be discarded. > > B. Separate -1 from Veto. A -1, by default, counts just as a vote > against, and the majority will rule. -1 keeps its power as a strong > opinion against the proposal, and it should be justified and the voter > should try to convince others why the proposal is bad. A -1 can still > influence other voters and can change the outcome when the concerns > raised in the motivation for the -1 are accepted as valid. We can put > more weight into the -1, so for example a vote passes if (2*-1s) + (+1s) > > 0, or (-1s) + (+1s) > 3, or another balanced variation. An actual Veto > must be marked as such, but the vetoer must bring very good reasons for it. > The balance might work if we were much more committers. Right now if a vote has 8+ voters is a popular vote (usually we have 5 people voting). In a 5 people's vote, having a -1 states that there is a 20% disagreement. IMO that's a lot. So I think that '+1', '+0', '-0', '-1' works very well for us and we should just update the documentation to explain it better. Thanks, Caty > > I'm +1 for either proposal, leaning towards 2, since it's clearer when a > vote can be passed or not. To offer the other alternative: > > C. Just keep things as they are now, since you think that the current > process has worked well so far, and nobody abused the right to veto. > > [1] http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/Community/Committership#HVoting > -- > Sergiu Dumitriu > http://purl.org/net/sergiu > _______________________________________________ > devs mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs > _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
