Rule changes / Voting issues

[Hauke Mehrtens]

Hi Rich,

On 7/10/25 19:35, Rich Brown wrote:
> Hauke and others,
> 
> Our messages passed in the aether...  In reading your note, I agree with most of it. I see these unresolved concerns:
> 
> 1) There is some overlap between "people who have commit rights on the main repo", "people who have commit rights on other repo's (packages?)", and "OpenWrt members" (who likely have voting rights).

I would like to relax the connection between member status and commit 
access. I did this PR:
https://github.com/richb-hanover/OpenWrtRules/pull/2/files

> It feels like to me that these Rules govern the "voting rights and governance" of the project, while commit rights are independent - some voting members can commit, while others do not. How can we resolve this? What would you (or the group) like to see?

I think we should keep commit access in the rules, because it was a main 
part before.

I would like to change it that all active members can get commit access, 
but they do not have to. I would like to get the active and inactive 
member status to allow us to remove commit credentials also for security 
reasons.
  > 2) I agree that there should be a separate "policy" document that 
describes our current practices (how many times to send a message to 
apparently inactive members; standard wording for that message; who has 
commit rights, etc.) that shouldn't/don't need to be spelled out in the 
Rules. These would likely be published on the OpenWrt site and subject 
to "simple approval" if they need to be changed. I'll send a followup 
note with a proposal.

Yes this would probably be helpful, but I do not think it is very 
important now. I think currently it works out without too.
> 3) A quorum of votes. Perhaps there could be a rule that all votes require a quorum of active members. Most public bodies I know about require >= 50% of the members to take action. We could have a rule that does the same thing, then require a simple majority (or two-thirds for a rule change) of the received votes to approve the action.

I think we need a quorum so that it is harder to hack the rules, but 
currently the quorum causes our problems.
> 4) Handling neutral responses. I see your point: sometimes you just don't have enough information to cast an informed vote. Either the proposal itself doesn't have enough information; you have a question that isn't addressed by the proposal; or it's so outside your expertise that you can never be informed. I think one solution to these is to encourage members to ask for more information. For example:
> 	- Please explain more about why this is important...
> 	- Please tell me how the proposal will solve the problem I see, namely ...
> 	- I am indifferent to this (can't cast an informed vote). Are there others who feel strongly either way?
> Any of these will elicit more discussion, and your vote can be guided by the responses of others (who you trust to use their good judgement)

There are also topics I do not care much about and I think the majority 
will just decide correctly or people are just lazy, I think neutral 
votes should be fine.

> Thanks.
> 
> Rich
> 
>> On Jul 10, 2025, at 11:45, Rich Brown <richb.hanover at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Hauke,
>>
>> Thanks for this PR (https://github.com/richb-hanover/OpenWrtRules/pull/1). As I think further about the issue, I am not convinced we need to add an "active voter" status. In fact, I am not convinced we need to change the thresholds from the Current Rules (https://openwrt.org/rules) at all.
>>
>> I took the liberty of cataloguing all our previous votes from https://openwrt.org/voting/start into a spreadsheet at [1]. It shows that we currently have 43 committers but only 27 of those people have voted in the last 12 months.
>>
>> A couple observations:
>>
>> a) If we had enforced the Current Rule 4 - removing committers after three months (or even 12 months) of inactivity - the vote to approve DragonBluep (15 positive votes, one neutral, zero negative) would have succeeded. It cleared the simple majority threshold of 50% - 14 votes.

I think we can not enforce it so easily.
It is not defined what active means and some of the people how did not 
vote in the last 12 months did commit something.

Hauke