> On Jul 18, 2018, at 6:18 PM, Łukasz Langa <luk...@langa.pl> wrote:
>
>
>> On Jul 18, 2018, at 4:56 PM, Brett Cannon <br...@python.org> wrote:
>>
>> While I am totally fine with a super-majority of votes for something to be
>> accepted, I don't think the minimum participation requirement will work. If
>> people simply choose not to vote then they choose not to (we have no way to
>> really compel people to vote).
>
> It could be easily added to the list of things expected from a core
> contributor. It's not like this is a laborious chore, neither is it happening
> often. There are countries where voting is mandatory.
Given that we don’t have a lot of levers in our tool chest to compel voting,
what would you propose we do if we get only a 35% participation rate? We can’t
drag people to the polls, the most we can really do is either keep running
elections and hope you hit whatever threshold you decide on, or you start
removing people who can vote until you’ve removed enough people that the people
who are participating now make up whatever your target participation rate is.
The first choice there strikes me as unrealistic. Hope is not a strategy, and I
fail to see why repeatedly offering the same vote multiple times is likely to
increase the participation rate. In fact, I think it’s likely to decease it as
people get tired of having to do it over again and just start giving up and
viewing it as noise.
The second choice seems… dishonest to me? You’re not really increasing the
participation of the vote, you’re just juicing the numbers to make the
participation rate higher. It’s selectively defining who is eligible to vote to
make the numbers look better.
Is there another option I’m missing to compel people to vote?
>
> Taking a step back, there are two reasons I stress the importance of (almost)
> everybody voicing their support:
> - this makes the decision authoritative ("the committers have spoken”);
I think this is largely a non-issue. In the US we do not have mandatory
elections, and I don’t see very many people challenging the authority of said
elections due to the large percentage of non-voters. The most I generally see
if people scolding those who don’t vote.
> - this ensures that we haven't omitted somebody due to poor timing ("I was on
> a sabbatical and couldn't vote”).
Unless you require 100% voting participation, it doesn’t ensure this, it just
makes it less likely. If you target 90%, then a full 10% of the people could
have been excluded due to poor timing.
I don’t think it’s possible to fully eliminate this risk, but I think the best
possible way of handling it is to advertise the vote well in advance, and allow
the vote itself to take place over a reasonable amount of time. The more
advance notice, and the larger the window of time is to actually vote in, the
less likely timing becomes an issue. Just to pluck some random times out of the
air, if you advertise the voting for 3 months and allow voting to happen any
time in a months time, that gives people a full 4 months they will have to be
completely unavailable to have no idea the voting is happening, and be unable
to access a computer for a handful of minutes to actually do the vote at all in
a month.
>
> If you feel like this is unrealistic because most of our committers aren't
> currently active, I hear you. But what I like even less is claiming that "we,
> the core team" made a decision when, say, just 35% of us voted. In such case
> it would be easier for those of us who disagree to claim the decision doesn't
> really represent the views of the greater core team.
>
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