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

[Matthias Hörmann]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 9:37 PM, John Wiegley <johnw at newartisans.com> wrote:
> In the last round, delegates from each country who make the final decision by
> majority. In the case of Haskell, our "countries" might be different:
> Academia, Industry, Hobbyists, etc. These delegates are supposed to represent
> the will of their constituents, but can vote however they wish.

The trouble with this would be that the split in the community does
not seem to be between
e.g. the interests of academia and industry but between conversative people
in academia and the industry and those who are more open to language
changes in both groups.

I suspect the divide isn't even close to the same on most questions
either so a representative
system might be tricky to implement.

Maybe if some form of grouping of people in the community is necessary
it should be made along
the lines of the groups we saw mentioned in recent FTP discussions:
authors of printed books,
new Haskell users coming from other languages and new Haskell users
learning it without prior experience,
Haskell teachers, maintainers of libraries spanning many GHC versions, users
writing new code without backwards compatibility concerns, those
interested in using only one
of the existing Haskell standards without language extensions and
those interested in using
the latest extensions available,...

Perhaps in future discussions a focus should be on identifying and
grouping the users affected by
each change and each user should be encouraged to vote +1, 0 or -1 for
each of the groups they
are a part of separately, explaining how they arrived at their final
vote themselves.

Matthias Hörmann