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To: Benjamin Morel <benjamin.morel@gmail.com>,
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Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2020 15:07:13 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Community vote on RFCs
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> Understandably, the RFC voting process needs to be restricted to carefully
> selected people, mostly core developers. But the fact is, this process is a
> bit elitist, and fails to represent the community as a whole. A recent

PHP development is not a representative democracy. There's no
requirement to "represent" anyone, and nobody who doesn't contribute to
PHP development in a specific manner has any claim on a vote. If
somebody wants to voice an opinion, it's always welcome. But let's not
pretend like people who actually maintain PHP core and everybody who
ever used PHP or may be thinking about using it have equal weight here.
If it is "elitist" that's because there's the "elite" (not the word I
would choose but if we must keep with it for a minute) - people who
actually implement and maintain stuff. It doesn't mean they don't have
to listen to others - on the contrary - but there's no obligation not to
be "elitist".

> A project being nothing without its users, it would be nice to know whether
> an important change will make them happy or not.

If we could do that, it'd be awesome. I wouldn't mind using the same
tool to know the stock prices next year. But prediction is hard,
especially about the future. Only thing we can reasonably do is to know
the opinion of a tiny minority of the community, randomly self-selected,
about whether or not they think they will like something without the
experience of actually using it. That's certainly better than nothing,
but I wouldn't exaggerate too much about how much better.

> Therefore, I have in mind to develop (time permitting) an experimental
> tool, external to the PHP wiki, that would replicate the voting options of
> each RFC, but would allow everyone with a GitHub account to vote on the
> same options as the original RFC. While the vote results would not directly

Please feel welcome to. However, I don't think this should have any
official role in any PHP governance process, any more than any other
poll on the internet might. That said, my opinion is hearing other
opinions is rarely harmful and frequently useful, so why not.

-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com