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Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2020 15:43:20 -0700
Message-ID: <CAN2symhaeRHLS-P9xHQ0jYKa+ua6ujGpX7-Nwi2euEan4anR5A@mail.gmail.com>
To: Benjamin Morel <benjamin.morel@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Community vote on RFCs
From: paul.crovella@gmail.com (Paul Crovella)

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 4:19 PM Benjamin Morel <benjamin.morel@gmail.com> w=
rote:
>>
>> You're asking for useless, no-effort feedback in the form of votes
>> from people who have no actual involvement in the ongoing development
>> or maintenance of the project, so that's what I gave you.
>
>
> I'm surprised by these strong feelings. As a contributor and maintainer o=
f several open source projects, I'm always influenced by the number of thum=
bs up/down feedback a message receives when reading discussions on GitHub, =
whether they are from members/contributors of the project, or from seemingl=
y strangers. Of course, I'll often check who the feedback is coming from, a=
nd this influences me as well.
>
> I feel like this kind of feedback on the RFCs would be valuable to people=
 who have a right to vote, especially if there was a way to extract specifi=
cally the feedback from open source project leads or heavy contributors.
>
> But you may disagree, of course.
>
> - Benjamin

Would you have asked me to justify my position were it a "+1" instead?
Would you have still referred to it as pollution? I'm betting probably
not. This isn't a shot at you personally, questioning and criticizing
disagreement while accepting agreement without challenge is the
default thing people do - and it's part of why the polls you're after
have so little value as a feedback mechanism. If they agree with you
great - you've got a cudgel to use against those who disagree. If they
disagree with you then who cares - the poll itself was flawed
(wording, selection bias, etc.) and can be discounted out of hand as
there was no actual feedback to address. Heck, if you do it right you
can even pick and choose the votes you want based on merit badges (or
whatever other bar finds you agreement) then get on with derailing
substantive discussion to talk about the poll.

The absolute least useful thing someone can do is vote in a
non-binding poll then sit on their hands expecting it to matter. It's
100% noise. You might as well spend your day signing petitions on
facebook.

In addition the premise for your proposal is flawed and somewhat
insulting - the community already has a vote on every RFC. Lots of
them, in fact. All of them. Every single vote comes from a member of
the PHP community. And practically everyone, with voting privilege or
without, can meaningfully participate by joining the discussion. "The
community" isn't limited to people on reddit or your favorite OSS
clique and there's nothing stopping anyone from having a voice.