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Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 12:30:31 +1100
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To: Hannes Magnusson <hannes.magnusson@gmail.com>
Cc: "Sebastian B.-Hagensen" <sbj.ml.read@gmail.com>, Anthony Ferrara <ircmaxell@gmail.com>, 
	"internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting irregularities
From: pierre.php@gmail.com (Pierre Joye)

hi,

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:00 AM, Hannes Magnusson
<hannes.magnusson@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 2:15 PM, Sebastian B.-Hagensen
> <sbj.ml.read@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2015-03-17 20:55 GMT+01:00 Hannes Magnusson <hannes.magnusson@gmail.com>:
>>> If you need to confirm the statistics, or gather more background data,
>>> then feel free to contact me privately, off the list, and I'll get you
>>> the account approval dates (karma and/or wiki).
>>
>> While I agree that the issue at hand was not presented in the way it
>> should have been may still become a valid issue in the future.
>> If you want to prevent situations or even (wrong) ideas and
>> accusations like these the dates of account creations have to be
>> public and easily accessible by everyone involved (publicly listed on
>> people.php.net for example).
>
>
> people.php.net are php.net karma holders. We have no responsibility to
> disclose any information about our contributors to anyone.
> It is however fun to do so, so I created people.php.net listing random
> info about our contributors. If you can think of other fun things to
> do with that website, I'd love feedback and contributions!
>
> The wiki account system is different. php.net karma holders have
> access out-of-the-box using their vcs credentials.
> Then there is a special case where you have to register to the wiki itself.
> Having a wiki account does nothing out-of-the-box.
> You have to ask for specific access.
> Since the inception of the wiki I have been the only one giving out
> wiki credentials. This has mostly been to outsiders wanting to write
> RFCs.
> I have vague memories having given 2-3 people access to
> https://wiki.php.net/usergroups and similar to docs and so on.
> These people still cannot vote.
> A person who maintains popular pecl extension cannot vote either,
> unless the extension is maintained on the php.net infrastructure (and
> therefore requiring php.net account) btw.
>
> There have been several members from the community that have asked for
> voting privileges, as per the voting rfc. I have arbitrary approved
> maybe 3 or 4 over the years. The other 5-10 did not get voting
> privileges because the authors of the voting rfc didn't care.
>
> I have absolutely no interest this voting business and and strongly
> disagree with the entire voting rfc idea. I would love to get back to
> http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html


that's your good right to disagree and I respect your opinion in that regard.

However, as of today, you are the blocking point when it comes to
improve the wiki RFCs, registration and voting areas.And this is
really becoming a problem. I am not talking about irregularities and
the likes and I agree that it may not be fair to start bitching about
one or another vote, especially for some 1st time voters but oldest
contributors. While I do see an issue with inactive developers
suddenly jumping in but not using or contributing to PHP in any form
since quite long. But this is a totally different issues and I really
have no idea how to solve that, I do not see it as a big issue either
so...

However, the RFCs have been abused in many possible ways where I
thought common sense will make people act fairly and correctly. I was
wrong. Having simple technical measures to ensure fairness in
discussions, voting and end of voting periods will prevent some of
these abuses to happen again. It is possible to achieve that without
going down a more drastic road (anonymous votes or other more deep
changes) but will make things work the same way for everyone.

The other problem I see, which becomes a habit for a couple of RFC
authors, is the quality of the RFC. On one hand we have detailed high
quality RFC, clear communications and flows and on the other hand,
incomplete, confusing, lack of communications (aka missing the points
of a Request for Comments completely). And this is a much more bigger
worry than anything else. We have to fix that and such RFCs must be
discarded or simply not accepted to vote unless they actually reach a
certain quality and will to discuss. I will start another separate
thread about that.

Now, to be able to actually implement the little technical measure to
ensure that everyone follows the same rules, I ask you one more time
to provide the data of the current wiki so patches, changes etc can be
implemented in a safer way. You know where to reach me to provide it.
Thanks for your cooperation.

Cheers,
-- 
Pierre

@pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org