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Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2012 20:44:32 +0200
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To: Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>
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	PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [VOTE]Call for voting: support use list in foreach
From: tyra3l@gmail.com (Ferenc Kovacs)

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On Sun, Aug 26, 2012 at 8:20 PM, Stas Malyshev <smalyshev@sugarcrm.com>wrot=
e:

> Hi!
>
> > And this is how democracy works, Stas. If voters don't bother to turn
> > up, too bad.
>
> Putting aside the fact that democracy has very little to do with what
> we're trying to do here (we're not government, we're opensource
> project), that's how democracy *doesn't work*. As you noticed, it is
> "too bad", and it is exactly the problem we're having - without
> participation, votes are decided by a random sample of whoever bothered
> to appear, often on a single vote.
> This is not a way to build consensus.  It is a very unhealthy state of
> things, and it only contributes to the image of PHP as a project having
> no direction, no governance and basically existing in a state of
> brownian motion. I thought we were trying to shed this image.
>

To make things a little bit clear.
The members of the 'admin', 'phpcvs', 'voting' groups can vote.
The admin and voting group membership is handed out on case-by-case basis
(although we don't have an open process for that), and the phpcvs group
membership is granted when somebody logs in with a php.net account, so
anybody with a php.net account can vote by default.
Last time when I asked, I was told, that only 3 people has membership of
the voting group(dunno who handed out those), so they don't have a
significant presence in the voting.
Of course if we would actively would handle out accounts to active
community reps and such (which was somehow defined by and accepted with the
voting rfc) you concern could be real given that the active people seems to
be more active than the average person out of the ~3000 people with
php.netaccount.

Your other concern, that votes can win by a small margin:
The voting RFC states that syntax or other major changes require 2/3 of the
votes, other changes require simple majority (50%+1 vote).
The minimal discussion period, and minimal voting period was added that
there is enough time for the voters to understand the topic and hand, and
make their votes.

So we could either raise the required numbers, or the voting time period,
or we could create some arbitary number of minimal votes, but non of those
issues would fix our base problem: the lack of participation of the voters.
Of course, it would prevent us from accepting RFCs without a proper
evaluation, but it could also prevent us from accepting anything.

I think that the voting rfc itself is a good example of another problem:
accepting RFCs based on the subjective intention, instead of the actual
specification/implementation (or in the voting RFCs case, the lack of clear
specification in some areas).

Maybe now that we have some experience with the current process we could
create an improved version or an addition to the voting rfc.
What do you think?

--=20
Ferenc Kov=C3=A1cs
@Tyr43l - http://tyrael.hu

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