On Sun, May 25, 2003 at 04:04:59PM +0200, Jochen Voss wrote: > in our constitution I read (about Quorum) > > Q is half of the square root of the number of current Developers. > > Does anybody remember the reason for choosing half the square root? > Why not just, let's say, 10% of the developers? Or is the rationale > for this lost in time?
Fundamentally, the constitution tried to approximate existing practice. The observation, here, was that not everybody participates in every decision, and that as the number of developers increased the fraction involved decreased. Overgeneralizing, slightly: sometimes we solved things as individuals (thus developer and leader authority), sometimes we solved things as a group (thus the voting and quorum mechanism), sometimes we solved esoteric problems as small groups (mostly this is developers acting together, but this is also where the technical committee came from). The current quorum requirements are an approximate minimum based on that observation. -- Raul
