There hasn’t been too much feedback on the proposal or the implementation so 
far. I’ll give it until the weekend, and unless further comments or issues come 
up, I’ll assume a lazy consensus on the proposal and start looking into taking 
the system into use next week.

There are two additional items that I propose to add:

* voting will be open for 7 days to give everybody enough time to react
* The voting database will be deleted 2 weeks after voting ended

Cheers,
Lars

> On 1 Oct 2021, at 19:43, Lars Knoll <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> As you might have seen, we had a request for a formal vote of no confidence 
> on an Approver status according to the last paragraph in QUIP-2/How to become 
> an Approver(*) in the recent QBS thread(**).
> 
> This is the first time we will need such a formal vote, which also means that 
> we so far have not implemented a detailed process on how to do that. So 
> before we proceed with such a vote, we will need to solve the problem of how 
> to vote. This doesn’t require changes our governance model, we simply need to 
> define a process on how to implement it.
> 
> Our governance model makes it clear that most decisions are reached through 
> lazy consensus. However, I do not want such sensitive matters as a vote of no 
> confidence to be handled by public vote. Therefore, I think we ought to find 
> a different solution - which, fortunately, can be decided on with lazy 
> consensus.
> 
> I’ve been talking to a few people for ideas, and this basically turned up 
> three proposals. Here they are together with my thoughts on them:
> 
> 1. Use the mailing list. 
> 
> I do not like this idea, when it touches sensitive matters such as a 
> no-confidence vote. These kind of votes should in my opinion never be public. 
> So this is something I do not consider to be a good option. See also 
> https://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2021/04/msg00032.html for a recent 
> similar discussion in the Debian community.
> 
> 2. Approvers vote by sending me a private mail.
> 
> This would be possible, but is in my opinion far from ideal. I would need to 
> manually keep track of things running some risk of miscounting. In addition, 
> all individual votes would still be visible to me, with the risk of the voter 
> not participating due to the perceived social cost of doing so. People might 
> for example refrain from voting if they believe their opinion is not in line 
> with my thoughts.
> 
> 3. We have some automated system (a voting bot).
> 
> This sounds like the best option to me. Daniel Smith came up with the idea 
> and implemented a first version based on top of the cherry-pick bot that we 
> already use. You can find the implementation at 
> https://codereview.qt-project.org/c/qt/qtqa/+/373742 and a test instance at 
> https://qt-cherry-pick-bot-staging.herokuapp.com/voting/. It’s for now still 
> work in progress (you should e.g. not see the result before the end of the 
> voting period), but this is something we should be able to fix before we go 
> live.
> 
> The solution would have the following advantages:
> 
> * We can easily wipe the individual data some time after the vote is finished 
> and only keep the final result to comply with data privacy regulations and 
> keep the vote secret
> * The allowed group for voting (Approvers or Maintainers) can be defined and 
> is connected to our gerrit Approver and Maintainer groups.
> * It automatically counts the results
> * It can be made anonymous (Current implementation allows gerrit admins to 
> manually look into the database, so we need to govern access or improve that 
> part of the implementation)
> 
> I’d like to propose that we implement a voting procedure using this voting 
> bot. We need it for this one case, but would also benefit from having such a 
> tool in other cases, where the lazy consensus model might not be the best 
> solution.
> 
> We wouldn’t be the first ones to do that, there are other open source 
> communities out there that have secret voting procedures in place.
> 
> Please let me know what you think.
> 
> Cheers,
> Lars
> _______________________________________________
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