The ballot for the current proposals is shaping up to be rather complicated. There are currently 5 proposals, plus at least one in the making, plus "further discussion".
In the interest of reducing the risk of somebody voting for something they did not intend to, simply out of confusion, I (meta)propose that the actual voting part of the ballot should contain ultra-short summaries of which option is which, rather than just "Option A: Steve Langasek's proposal" and so forth. This was discussed on IRC, and the project secretary agreed in principle but added that in order to stay strictly neutral he does not want to be involved in drafting the actual summaries. I therefore volunteered to write a first draft and try to gather a consensus about how the actual ballot should look. The ideal outcome would be that we find a set of summaries such that *each* proposer agrees that *all* the summaries are fair and neutral descriptions of the proposals they apply to. If such a consensus cannot be reached, we will probably have stick to using proposer's names instead of descriptions on the ballot, and everybody will lose. The following is my initial draft of a set of descriptions. It will surprise me if everybody is immediately happy with it, but at least it will give us a target to shoot at. I follow the enumeration of proposals used on <http://www.debian.org/vote/2004/vote_004>. [###] Choice A: Postpone changes until September 2004 [needs 3:1] [###] Choice B: Postpone changes until Sarge releases [needs 3:1] [###] Choice C: Add apology to Social Contract [needs 3:1] [###] Choice D: Revert to old wording of SC [needs 3:1] [###] Choice E: "Transition Guide" foundation document [needs 3:1] [###] Choice X: Further discussion The space for descriptions is rather limited - the vote-taking software wants each choice to fit on one line, and if the lines get longer than 72-73 characters, MUA's will begin to wrap them, invalidating the vote being sent. This implies an absolute maximum length of 45 characters for the short description. There's a tradition of having "[3:1 majority needed]" on the ballot lines, but in this case that would probably leave too little space to differentiate easily between the proposals. Does anyone think that "[needs 3:1]" is too terse? Another option would be to omit the [3:1] markers from the ballot lines entirely. It could be argued that it is more important to be able to understand what one is voting, than knowing which options need what kind of majority (at least I cannot imagine how anybody's *ranking* of the proposals would be influenced by the kind of majority each needs to pass). Of course, it is still expected of developers that they read the actual, full, text of each proposal before deciding how to rank them. The short descriptions are a tool for remembering which proposal is which while filling in and cross-checking one's ballot. This will, I hope, be emphasised elsewhere in the calls-for-votes. I solicit comments about the above from -vote in general, but I would especially like to hear reactions from the proponent of each proposal. -- Henning Makholm "The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internists' wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning."
