Re: [PATCH] Documentation: propose community voting process

["Kristoffer Haugsbakk" <kristofferhaugsbakk@fastmail.com>]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2026, at 22:03, Emily Shaffer wrote:
> Not all discussions can be settled by community consensus. For truly
> contentious decisions we need a way to democratically make a decision
> that represents the majority will of the project. This doc outlines the
> methodology we use in the rare case where we need to vote to make a
> decision.

I’m a lurker when it comes to these things, but this is the first time
I’ve seen that the Git project aspires to be democratic. Or that I’ve
seen any wish for that from relative insiders to relative outsiders.

>
> Signed-off-by: Emily Shaffer <emilyshaffer@google.com>
> ---
> Hi folks,
>
> Thanks for your patience with this taking much longer than I expected or
> wanted it to.
>
> As we discussed in the Contributor Summit this past September[1], there's
> interest in taking a formal community vote to decide whether and how to accept
> AI contributions. The topic is of course a very contentious one, and I don't
> think that we're going to come to general consensus the way we have on most
> other concerns in the past.

The vote will pass. Those who work on Git at least once a month work for
tech companies. Those tech companies are now AI companies. The votes
will happen to drift towards agreement with their management.

>
>[snip]
> commit outlining the voting process. And by the way, I do think that we should
> check in the voting process; it seems likely to me that we will want to revise
> the AI policy again given the pace of development, and it may be useful for
> other discussions that we've had trouble resolving in the past.

Even the Himalayas will flatten one day.

There is overall great acceptance from the powers that be towards those
that don’t use GenAI. Because either you adopt it today, or three months
from now; it’s inevitable.

>
> BTW, there are some parts of this proposal that I still don't have a good
> answer for, so look for my self-review immediately to follow, highlighting open
> questions.
>
> [1]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/summit-2026.94e33e9ddf234334.06@ttaylorr.com/
> [2]: https://lore.kernel.org/git/20190924064454.GA30419@sigill.intra.peff.net/
> [3]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/5cdf2301d4a8b439f89fd2cdfed13736ccd64a30
>
> ---
>[snip]