Re: [PATCH] Documentation: propose community voting process

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2026-10-21 at 20:05:06, Emily Shaffer wrote:
> There are a few appealing options.
> 
> * Debian uses devotee (https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devotee), which
> appears to require hosting. Finding neutral hosting may prove tricky.
> * Konstantin let me know that The Linux Foundation's Technical
> Advisory Board has used CIVS (https://civs1.civs.us/) in the past. He
> says he wasn't involved in setting it up but doesn't think it looks
> too challenging. CIVS and devotee use the same tallying algorithm.

I'm not volunteering to set this up or maintain things, but I do follow
Debian stuff reasonably closely and I have a positive opinion of
devotee.

> * jj used voting on a GitHub poll in the past. That would just give us
> simple majority, and it would require GitHub accounts, which may be a
> barrier.

I think some people who are contributors will not want to use GitHub and
we've historically been neutral on forges and tooling, so we should
continue that policy here.

> > +Votes are welcome from contributors who have authored a commit which has been
> > +merged to next, or who have provided 2 or more code reviews, and who have not
> > +been banned from participation in the project. All eligible contributor votes
> > +are weighed equally, regardless of the overall number of contributions they
> > +have landed.

I think this is too few contributions.  Other projects use a much
tighter mechanism for choosing contributors and some even restrict
access to a core team.  I'm not saying that we should do that here, but
we should put a threshold in place where people are not incentivized to
contribute only to vote.  That is, we want contributors to contribute
for the sake of contributing and have voting be merely a consequence
of being a serious contributor.

At this moment, I'm not sure exactly where that threshold should be set,
though.

> * Easy (scriptable) eligibility determination. If we start to explore
> other types of contribution, like user support in non-mailing-list
> platforms, it becomes really difficult to send a ballot to everyone
> who's supposed to get one.

Scriptability is important, I agree.
-- 
brian m. carlson (they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA
Speaking for myself only

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