[RFC] Rethink the voting / decision making process

[David Lang]

On Fri, 27 May 2016, Jo-Philipp Wich wrote:

>> In both of these cases, I would say that to start with, see if you can
>> live with a small number of 'bad' voters in the pool. While you could
>> setup a mechanism to ban voters, the very existance of such a mechanism
>> is going to cause problems, let alone invoking it. If there are enough
>> LEDE people, a few votes by people hostile to LEDE isn't going to
>> matter. If the numbers start getting significant enough, the rules can
>> be changed (before they become large enough to dictate the rules)
>
> I very much agree here, we just need to figure out a somewhat objective
> way to measure "activity" of a given person.
>
> Maybe the following would work:
>
> - Add something similar to the 5 activity indicators above to the rules
> - Assume voters to fulfill those criteria and only scrutinize if
>   suddenly an unfamiliar face appears
> - In edge cases let the majority decide whether the person is accepted
>   as voter (yay, meta-voting :))

do you want default-allow or default-deny?

I would suggest default-allow. Let the person vote unless they are doing 
something extreme to harm the project.

How many votes do you think you will have? If you are thinking in terms of <10 
votes, then a couple bad voters in the mix can be a huge problem.

But if you have 100 voters, a handful of bad voters isn't going to matter. If 
you have 1000 votes, even less so.

how many people with commits in the last 6 months (don't forget to include 
commits to the feeds)

can someone look at the OpenWRT forum logs and extract some commit counts 
(anonomised if needed, but ideally you should be able to filter out the people 
who also appear in the first group)

I suspect that the voting pool is going to be much larger than you expect. If 
you are thinking in terms of the half dozen former OpenWRT developers who 
founded LEDE, every vote is extremely significat. But if you find that in 6 
months you have a few hundredpeople with commits (even if they are drive-by 
commits), and then add a similar number of other contributers, a few upset 
voters are just noise.

David Lang