Re: Voting/Decision making guidelines

At 20:54 -0700 2000.07.24, Derek J. Balling wrote:
>At 1:42 PM +1000 7/25/00, [email protected] wrote:
>>
>>May I suggest, as one possible solution, Sourceforge.  It supports
>>"surveys" where people can vote on various things, as well as bug
>>tracking and other useful features.  http://sourceforge.net/ is the URL.
>
>Does sourceforge allow "weighting" of votes?
>
>I'd hate to have someone decide that they wanted useless_feature_foo
>and go convince the slashdot-masses to vote overwhelmingly to muddy
>the kernel with lots of stuff for useless_feature_foo.
>
>I'd rather have folks like Larry being able to veto stuff, etc.

OK, I'd like to take a small step back and find out what the purpose of
voting is.  I've tried to find out from previous posts and couldn't.  I
guess Chip shares my concerns:


At 21:04 -0700 2000.07.24, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
>As for voting: I've seen a few people mention votes as part of some
>process or other.  But without formal membership in an organization (a
>la Debian, and let's *not* go there!)  I don't see how voting could
>actually be a useful part of a political process.  It can only be used
>for opinion polls.


As I see it, voting could serve two purposes: an advisory role, or a
decision-making role.  The latter seems unreasonable; this is why we have
the pumpkings and working groups.  The former seems subuseful; this is why
we have the pumpkings and working groups.  :-)

I suppose it can't hurt anything as long as we don't take the voting too
seriously; but if we aren't going to take it too seriously, what's the
point?  If we do take it too seriously, it seems to me that it will harm
more than help.  "We voted on such-and-such but so-and-so is doing
something else instead."  Opinions are fine, but I think that a written
proposal and discussion is more useful than a count of who likes what.  I'd
rather just see interested parties come up with working groups they'd like
to have, as many as they want, and let the perl6-poobahs (or whoever is
selected by them to perform this task) approve or veto each.


And I'd like to request once more that the discussions here stay on-topic.
OOp syntax and default functions and all this are not on-topic for this
list.

-- 
Chris Nandor       |     [email protected]      |     http://pudge.net/
Andover.Net        | [email protected] | http://slashcode.com/