Hi Guillaume, Your arguments are very valid and I've considered them a lot before sending my vote. Actually to be perfectly honest, I've been on the fence on this question for several years now. However I've been slightly more in favor of the private list idea lately (I think due to the fact that I've proposed quite a few committers. It's probably harder to understand if you haven't done so).
See below for more details. On Oct 10, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote: > Hi, > > I agree with Caty on this. Voting someone a committer is an important event, > it's a acknowledgement of her value by fellow community members. In addition > to this, if an existing committer thinks that a proposed new committer does > not provide work of a good enough quality to become a committer, I think > that it's very important for the existing committer to articulate her > judgement so that the potential new committer can improve and try again. In > addition to this, it forces existing committers to argue in favor of and > stand by their point of view. > > The same is true when one wants to retire a committer or make her emeritus. > If she disagrees, she should be able to debate her point of view in the > open. Plus some members of the community outside existing committers might > provide valuable feedback about a potential new committer. > > I also believe that you are raising a non-existing issue. In the 6+ years of > existence of the XWiki community and using an open process to vote new > committers, I have not heard even once anyone complaining about having an > open process. Nor am I aware of any friction caused by this process. If > anything, it only strengthens the authenticity and transparency of XWiki's > Open-Source community. Actually this questions arises relatively frequently in open source communities (be it apache or elsewhere) and I've seen it raised several times in my 12-13 years of open source. The other reason you haven't experienced may be because you've not proposed committers yet. You haven't had to individually contact every one to make sure the vote will get accepted, convince people offline that it's a good choice, etc. Apparently you call this transparency… :) I don't. How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions on new members or even with -1? Answer: none How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions or even -1 or topics other than member voting? Answer: frequently Why? Because people are respectful and tend to shy away from telling someone in their face that they just sucks, or that they're too junior even with 15 years of experience… ;) My proposal is just to make voting a new member a real voting process. Actually you're forgetting one part which is one issue IMO. Let me give you an example. Imagine that I've seen that XXX has a good level of understanding of the xwiki platform and that he's submitted several patches in the past and I think he would be a good addition to the committers to the xwiki project. Right now I have 2 choices: * Send a VOTE email on the devs list. Two possibilities: ** he's accepted. Now I need to ask him if he's interested. If not, then the vote was for nothing ** he's not accepted. Now XXX sees this. Maybe someone said that he needs to provides more patches before he can be accepted or that his patches have some issues, etc. On one hand it's good since he now knows what he should improve, OTOH depending on how well-phrased or not the negative answers were, he'll feel let down and make simply stop participating to the project completely * Ask the potential committer if he'd be willing to become a committer (with all the committer duties - see committership on dev.xwiki.org). ** if he says yes and he's not accepted that sucks since you had increased his expectations and he's going to feel he's been let down or that his work is not appreciated, etc ** if he says no, then no issues. No vote is started. However others don't know about it. The solution I'm proposing is to send a mail on the committers@ list. If he's voted ok then we can contact him and ask him if he's interested in becoming a committer. If he's voted down no harm is done. Now I've always hesitated on this topic since I've seen arguments on both sides of the fence. I also agree that ideally it would be best done in the open if it could work but it doesn't IMO because of the way human relations work. People don't tell other people what they think of them in front of their face. Here's what Karl Fogel says in his book: "Producing open source software: how to run a successful free software project": http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html " […] The voting system itself should be used to choose new committers, both full and partial. But here is one of the rare instances where secrecy is appropriate. You can't have votes about potential committers posted to a public mailing list, because the candidate's feelings (and reputation) could be hurt. Instead, the usual way is that an existing committer posts to a private mailing list consisting only of the other committers, proposing that someone be granted commit access. The other committers speak their minds freely, knowing the discussion is private. Often there will be no disagreement, and therefore no vote necessary. After waiting a few days to make sure every committer has had a chance to respond, the proposer mails the candidate and offers him commit access. If there is disagreement, discussion ensues as for any other question, possibly resulting in a vote. For this process to be open and frank, the mere fact that the discussion is taking place at all should be secret. If the person under consideration knew it was going on, and then were never offered commit access, he could conclude that he had lost the vote, and would likely feel hurt. Of course, if someone explicitly asks for commit access, then there is no choice but to consider the proposal and explicitly accept or reject him. If the latter, then it should be done as politely as possible, with a clear explanation: "We liked your patches, but haven't seen enough of them yet," or "We appreciate all your patches, but they required considerable adjustments before they could be applied, so we don't feel comfortable giving you commit access yet. We hope that this will change over time, though." Remember, what you're saying could come as a blow, depending on the person's level of confidence. Try to see it from their point of view as you write the mail. […] " > In contrast to this, having an opaque voting process opens the door to > questioning from the outside world (was there backdoor discussions with > regards to the vote of X? if not, why was the vote hidden?). Having a fully > open public voting process reinforces the trust of every member in the > community. Although I agree that security-related issues are a valid > exception, I don't think that it's the case for voting new committers. > > Thus I'm (non-binding) -1 on this new proposal (about which I maybe would > not even have been able to talk if that policy was put in place). The goal is not to decide to put other VOTEs on this private list. Only for committer voting. Thanks -Vincent > Guillaume > > On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 3:51 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Not very sure about it. >> >> And how do we announce the new commiter that he has been voted? Are we >> still >> making the announcement public? >> The feeling of being voted is very nice, you get a picture of the people >> that appreciate what you do. Letting this go would be a pitty and if we are >> not removing this part then it means we are gonna duplicate the vote. >> >> Also the voting process is usually initiated by an existing commiter. IMO >> the initiator is responsible to assure he is proposing someone who will be >> accepted without problems. Until now people that didn't agreed with >> something (or didn't had enough information about the topic) they didn't >> vote. Because our number is increasing I propose to increase the needed >> votes to pass the proposal from 3 to 5+, or why not even half+1 in >> important >> cases, like this one. >> >> IMO, we either do everything public or not. So doing a private list just >> for >> this purpose is not sufficient IMO and is also a not very encountered case. >> >> Thanks, >> Caty >> >> On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 16:16, Vincent Massol <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> >>> On Oct 10, 2011, at 3:05 PM, Vincent Massol wrote: >>> >>>> Hi devs, >>>> >>>> There are a few topics that are not supposed to be public or that would >>> be better be not public. >>>> >>>> One such topic is when we want to VOTE someone as a committer. It's >> very >>> uncomfortable to do this in the open for the following reasons: >>>> * committers are tempted to VOTE +1 since voting negatively is seen >>> publicly, including by the person being voted on >>>> * it's very undelicate to have this in the open especially if the >> person >>> is voted down since that'll affect that person's morale and future >>> participation in the project >>>> >>>> So I'd like to propose creating a [email protected] list with the >>> following characteristics: >>>> * private, visible only to committers >>> >>> So here are some use cases for this list: >>> >>> * voting in members >>> * excluding members >>> >>> Any other topic you see? >>> >>> +1 from me. >>> >>>> I also propose it to use it for voting committers. >>> >>> +1 >>> >>> Thanks >>> -Vincent >>> >>>> WDYT? >>>> >>>> Thanks >>>> -Vincent _______________________________________________ devs mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/devs
