Contribution vs quality, and a few notes on the Platform process

[wren ng thornton]

On 11/8/10 10:04 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On 8 November 2010 08:06, Bryan O'Sullivan<bos at serpentine.com>  wrote:
>>
>> An Apache-style vote system for resolving points of disagreement, so that we
>> can move past them reasonably swiftly instead of going in endless
>> morale-sapping circles. This is particularly important to me. I'd really
>> have liked to be able to say "we discussed this, it's over" about naming,
>> but instead I feel that objectors held, in effect, a veto. The current
>> consensus system seems to require complete agreement from all parties, which
>> seems perverse.
>
> I'll raise this with the steering committee. Voting is something we
> tried to avoid in the process when we first designed it, but the
> intention was always to see how things went and review. Voting may be
> a useful thing to bring in at some points if there's a clear case that
> some decision is better than no decision. If we decide to add this to
> the process my view would be that it should be only used occasionally
> for specific issues, perhaps issues of general principle rather than
> specific issues in a proposal (obviously Text brought up a couple of
> those).

I don't know much about Apache's system, but I think it would be good to 
have something like this considered as an informal show of hands, rather 
than as voting per se. (Perhaps my idea belongs more to the previous 
bullet point than this one.) There are good reasons to want to avoid 
voting, but I think a good deal of the repetition in discussing things 
was due to a lack of some more permanent means of people just specifying 
how they feel about some given topic.

-- 
Live well,
~wren