Dear all, as most of you know, the Prometheus governance[1] has three levels of formalized decision making. In increasing order of strength and requirements, they are: * Consensus * Majority vote * Supermajority vote
The consensus definition is taken from CouchDB[2] and goes deeply into its intention to be lightweight and easy to reverse. Yet, a careful and literal reading of it enshrines what is factually a veto mechanism. Vetos are easy to utter but hard to unblock short of voting or an in-between secondary consensus mechanism we have come to call "Call for Consensus" on the mailing lists. In practice, it sometimes feels as if consensus is heavier a process than outright voting, an order which goes against the initial intention behind our governance. Contrast this to the IETF definition[3] which is more formal, but explicitly acknowledges that "Rough consensus is when all issues are addressed, but not necessarily accommodated". IETF has decades of experience with highly contentious topics which are, sometimes, discussed by directly opposed parties. It's important to note that the IETF rough consensus mechanism presumes the existence of Chairs, but I think we would not need to rely on such heavyweight process. Personally, I am more used to the IETF definition and have not seen the CouchDB version seen wide adoption, which is part of the reason why I adopted rough IETF consensus for the Grafana governance[4] recently released. In order to make Prometheus move more quickly and more smoothly, I would like to suggest adoption the following change: https://github.com/prometheus/docs/commit/f7ee6ac5a9b841be6be25d92e2c403de15949491 Best, Richard [1] https://prometheus.io/governance/ [2] https://couchdb.apache.org/bylaws.html#lazy [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282 [4] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/GOVERNANCE.md -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Prometheus Developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/prometheus-developers/CAD77%2BgRvwnU%2BdFRMQ2n%2Bqf6D0oyej-btzsQYh8LjBV9FJ1a78w%40mail.gmail.com.
