Rule changes / Voting issues (was: Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules )

[Rich Brown]

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). 

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?

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.

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.

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)

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. 
> 
> b) A vote to change rules - again invoking the Current Rule 4 - would require two-thirds of the active committers (2/3 x 27) or 18 positive votes.
> 
> My new recommendation (that differs from what I posted on Github) is:
> 
> - Finalize the language of the "new rules" to say:
> 	- Simple approval requires "simple majority" of all active members (same as the Current Rules)
> 	- Rule changes require "two-thirds majority "of all active members (same as the Current Rules)
> 	- Make any other necessary changes to the language, get consensus
> - Invoke the Current Rule 4 now to declare that the list of committers includes only those who have voted in the last 12 months. This would leave 27 "active committers".
> - Offer an opportunity for any of the people left off the "Active Committers" list to be counted as active
> - Make a formal proposal for a vote to adopt these new rules. This would require 2/3 majority of the 27 active committers under the Current Rules
> 
> One question remains in my mind: there may be people who haven't voted recently who are actively committing code. How can we encourage them to vote on these issues?
> 
> Thoughts? Thanks.
> 
> Rich
> 
> [1] See the data at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Qqm3qopVJbEFB0rOPg7Mb3o-K2JMdpobPSX8toZlx30/edit?usp=sharing 
> 
> Summary of the spreadsheet: 
> 
> - The summary is in the blue header, the green header has the copy-pasted results from the 18 votes. 
> 
> - There is a pretty clear distinction between people who have voted in the last year (who have voted quite regularly), and those who voted in the last two years (who haven't voted recently at all). I don't think we lose anything by moving the latter group to inactive status - they can always return if they ask.
> 
> - As noted above, if those 16 "inactive" committers (43 - 27) were removed, the vote for DragonBluep would have passed.
> 
> 
>