[vote] Update OpenWrt rules

[Imre Kaloz]

On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 11:45 +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:

<snip>

> If you don't have a strong opinion about a motion, there are two things
> you can do:
> 
>  1. Just don't vote at all.
>  2. Explicitly cast a 'neutral vote' to say "I've seen this, and I
>     don't mind either way".

So let's say we only vote for a few months about giving commit access to
people who you don't support yet you are not against them getting access
your two options are:

1. "Just don't vote at all", and you are now inactive - congratulations!
2. Explicitly cast your neutral vote and make it a half-approval.

> If people don't vote at all, that's when we have concerns about
> gerrymandering, and votes being pushed through without sufficient
> consensus. That's precisely *why* we have a requirement for quorum.

No, gerrymandering is about making sure that the voting ratios favor
the outcome you want.

> That's what the second option is for, to allow someone to explicitly
> say that they *were* present and paying attention for the purposes of
> quorum, but that they just didn't have a strong opinion about the
> actual question.

The new proposal is taking away that option. What it achieves is basically
whenever you don't fully support the vote, you should always go against
it, even if it causes tension and drama in the community.

<snip>

>>> Also, while highlighting the importance of a vote is appreciated, stating
>>> that "if you want further changes to this topic, please approve the vote
>>> about this very topic" also sounds flawed to me - sorry Rich.

> Seems eminently sensible to me. We need to go and dig up dormant
> contributors one last time (probably by direct email instead of the
> openwrt-adm list which they're filing into a folder and ignoring), and
> persuade them to vote. Otherwise the project is mired in bureaucracy
> and can't ever make any decisions anyway. We can fine-tune the details
> afterwards once we can be more agile.

Before the project rejoin happened, the agreement was that we will define
the new rules together. After that, LEDE was busy adding as many voters
as possible before the merge, keeping the agreement intact yet invalidating
the faith it has been agreed on. I hope you don't think it's a coincidence
that about 80% of the original developers are gone. Given most of those
never have been added as voters, it seems that strategy is now biting back.

> The only reason to *object* to that is if you think it's some kind of
> bait-and-switch and would allow the rules to be subsequently changed to
> be completely different instead of just 'fine-tuning'. But you're not
> even objecting to the substance of the "we need better management of
> quorum requirements" anyway, are you?

If there is no bait-and-switch, just drop the one-of-a-kind-miracle-solution
of counting neutrals as half-approvals, as I have a hard time finding any
other project doing it.


Imre