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Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 21:01:13 -0700
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To: =?UTF-8?Q?Johannes_Schl=C3=BCter?= <johannes@schlueters.de>
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	Andrey Andreev <narf@devilix.net>, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Is it fair that people with no karma can vote on RFCs?
From: kris.craig@gmail.com (Kris Craig)

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On Mon, Sep 22, 2014 at 7:21 PM, Johannes Schl=C3=BCter <johannes@schlueter=
s.de>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 2014-09-22 at 14:36 -0700, Kris Craig wrote:
>
> > > Slightly provocative:  Why should I be forced to maintain code by
> > people who
> > > don't want to maintain it themselves?
> >
> > Nobody is forcing you to do anything.  You choose to contribute to PHP
> > in the manner in which you do, just as other people choose to
> > contribute in different, sometimes less obvious, ways.
>
> Right, nobody can truely enforce me doing something, still I gave some
> form of promise/commitment to less so since 5.3 reached EOL but still
> this might require me to do something.
>
> > Probably even due to votes by people
> > > about whom I don't know anything? Mind that most maintenance work by
> > > most contributors happens in free time on a voluntarily base.
> > >
> > > And no open source doesn't mean democracy as governing model.
> >
> > It can.  Every project is governed differently.
>
> Well democracy can mean so many things - in ancient Greece, the origin
> of democracy, only the men of a social group had a vote. Even in
> Switzerland, which is famous for its direct democracy, women weren't
> allowed to vote till 1971 (in the canton Appenzell Innerrhoden even only
> till 1990 for municipal issues) in others the voting power is unequally
> distributed (see i.e. the EU parliament where larger countries have less
> MEPs than smaller ones and different voting system's in different
> countries give different weight to citizens of different countries)
>
> Anyways this is a way different debate.
>

Fair enough.


>
> > Winston Churchill once famously said that democracy is the worst form
> > of government, except all the others that have been tried.
>
> While this depends on your view on what is good - Louis XIV of France
> was quite happy with his, I assume. But government of a society is
> different from governance of a software project. One case leads to a
> revolution, the other to a fork.
>

Also fair enough.


>
> > The
> > > democratic part is that people who don't like it can fork the
> > project and
> > > eventually receive a higher traction.
> >
> > And then we can have dozens of competing PHP codebases floating
> > around.
>
> That's were the social aspect comes back in - even people without a
> formal vote have ability to impact the project.
>

But that's assuming the threat of fork will be enough, thereby keeping
forks to a minimum.  I'm not sure I can concur with that assumption.


>
> > The problem with that model is that history has consistently shown
> > that those in power may listen, but will ultimately just do what they
> > want, anyway.
>
> If those with power will "ultimately just do what they want, anyway" the
> official form of governance doesn't matter at all. Thanks for agreeing
> to that :-D
>

I think you misunderstood.  Ignoring vote results derived from a
legitimized process that was agreed to is much more difficult that ignoring
a request made by some person without karma, with or without the threat of
a fork.


>
> But as this went to a path through European history let me reiterate and
> clarify what I said in a different post in this thread: The strict
> dependence on a vote impacts the constructive feedback for proposers
> negatively. It also provides no feedbackloop for leading to constructive
> critic being ignored, it becomes less clear whether voters were aware of
> that. It also makes simple contributions hard, adding quite some
> transactional cost for small improvements by newcomers. (then again here
> is no clear and objective measure what "small" includes) This is
> demotivating for all sides.
>

I wouldn't be against modifying the voting process to require everyone to
state a brief reason for their vote in order for it to be counted.  The
current table could be modified to add a text column easily enough, I'm
sure, and the results could display the reason next to each vote in the
row.  I think that would at least help mitigate the concerns you're raising
here.


>
> The approach I have in mind is going back to a consensus model by
> default, allowing truly everybody to participate and giving the
> opportunity to call for a vote if consensus can't be reached. Given our
> social diversity I however think that this hardly works out as there
> always will be somebody calling for a vote ... obvious consequence would
> be a quorum for calling for a vote .. wich ends up in even more
> bureaucracy hell.
>

I've noticed that minor changes are already made all the time without a
vote being called and I don't have any problem with that, nor am I aware of
anyone else who does.  Perhaps we could clarify exactly when a vote is
required and when it's not, but since that does not appear to have been an
issue thus far, it would probably just be a solution in search of a problem=
.


> >
> > I feel it's also worth reminding everyone that VCS accounts generally
> > aren't given away like candy.  Most people who have that access have
> > done something or another to earn it.
>
> It depends on the time of day and position of the stars, sometimes they
> are thrown on people unless they run really fast, sometimes nobody looks
> after requests ... :)
>

Heh true.  Perhaps we should focus our energy toward improving the process
of giving out VCS accounts, instead.


>
> johannes
> >
>
>
>
--Kris

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