Thanks for the referral, folk, as it gives us the opportunity to discuss and then standardise a policy for similar gating decisions (membership in teams managed by councils/boards) across the project.
On 28/07/11 20:23, Kees Cook wrote:
This issue has been referred to the CC from the TB: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/technical-board/2011-July/000956.html As I understand it, the question is essentially "do -1 votes detract from +1 votes, when seeking majority?" But that simplifies things a bit. It seems that a very specific voting procedure is desired.
In most governance models, voting or consensus are the preferred approaches. In the case of voting, it is almost always sufficient to gather a majority of support, even if there are dissenters.
There are risks to allowing a majority to overrule minority dissent. If a clique gains sufficient deciding votes it can stuff its candidates through the pipeline. And in our model, where councils manage teams of contributors who in turn are consulted in the selection of councils, that feedback loop could become toxic quickly.
However, we don't have direct elections. We have nominations and confirmation votes. That means that the CC, or me in the case of the CC, or the TB etc, can all override cases like this. We have safety mechanisms that are unusual and effective.
So for me, I think it's sufficient to gain a majority of +1's. This will mean faster decisions once that threshold is passed (or becomes impossible to achieve), as we will not have to tally all the potential votes to ensure there are not enough -1's to drop below threshold. This is standard governance, and perfectly suitable in our case.
If someone has real objections to a candidate, perhaps based on personal knowledge which is not widely available, they should trigger a private or public discussion of the candidacy and air what they know. If that doesn't convince enough people not to +1, then the decision is as it should be.
Mark -- technical-board mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/technical-board
