Different kind of votings (Re: Taking a step back)

[Henning Thielemann]

On Tue, 20 Oct 2015, Johan Tibell wrote:

> I'm taking a step back from day-to-day library work.

We have seen a lot of frustration with recent breaking changes to Prelude.

This makes me wonder whether we should try a different way of performing 
votings. Although there seems to be some agreement that majority votes are 
not the ultimate tool to make decisions, controversal proposals such as 
the FTP were essentially made by majority votes (strictly speaking it was 
a majority that convinced the benevolent dictators).

I have read about different voting systems that do not try to maximize the 
number of happy people but try to minimize the number of frustrated 
people.

Applied to libraries at haskell.org we would no longer count +1, -1 and 0, 
but only -1 and 0 anymore, but we would also consider the status quo as 
one of the alternatives.

E.g. if someone proposes something like FTP you would not answer +1 but 
instead:

proposal: 0
status quo: -1

or

proposal: 0
status quo: 0


I guess that this way we may find out that some proposals are nice to have 
for a majority of people but the status quo is not bad, too, and in 
summary there is no pressure to frustrate a (still big) minority.


How about that? Maybe other people have more experience with that voting 
system or have suggestions for alternatives.


(I am curious, whether someone replies "+1" to this suggestion.  :-)