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

[Manuel Gómez]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2015 at 11:19 PM, wren romano <wren at community.haskell.org> wrote:
> The real problem is the growing divide in the community between the
> "liberals" vs the "conservatives". We could define these groups as
> those who're willing to break things vs want more stability, or as
> those who embrace polymorphism vs those who want to minimize mental
> type inference, or a few other ways I'm sure. How exactly we define
> the groups doesn't much matter imo; the point is: there are two groups
> which are growing ever more divergent from one another. Changing how
> we make decisions isn't going to reconcile these two groups; so long
> as the groups are widely divergent, any decisions made will upset one
> or the other. So the real issue at hand is to address the following
> two questions:
>
> (1) how can we reconcile the two groups, reducing the distance between
> them so as to reduce conflict?
> (2) supposing the groups cannot be (sufficiently) reconciled, how do we proceed?

It may help to have some data to better understand the community's
postures.  Perhaps we could design a survey with questions on each of
these design orientations?  I’m not sure at all that it’d be helpful
to resolve conflicts, but it’d certainly be interesting to see what
clusters of language design ideas come up — the division you mention
certainly seems to be there in some intuitive sense, but our intuition
might be flawed in many ways (is polymorphism “conservative” or
“liberal”?).  We could include questions relating to the number of
public libraries published and maintained, time spent blogging,
subscription to various mailing lists, and such, to see how design
ideas relate to various forms of community involvement.

Of course, results are likely to be awfully biased in many ways if
such a survey is not designed, promoted and analyzed very carefully,
and it may turn out that arguments based on the resulting data end up
being harmful to the community’s discussions.  I don’t know; I’m just
curious!