Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 11:44:16AM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Marc Haber  writes:
> 
> > The one we just had was tl;dr to me. The people pushing it gave me zero
> > motivation to read it, I spent my spare time on my packages.

While I can't speak for Russ, I did try to summarize in "normal"
language what I was trying to accomplish with my proposal in its
rationale.

I don't know if that was clear enough (I guess it wasn't, given your
message here), but hey, I tried.

> 
> As the person proposing this GR, I think that's a perfectly reasonable
> stance to take, and to be quite honest one of my goals was to *not* give
> people a (negative) motivation to feel like they have to be involved.

+1.

Some votes have a big impact on what we do in Debian, and they matter.
This one? Not so much. It was mostly a bug fix, and while I had some
strong disagreements with Russ on one particular bit of his proposal,
when all is said and done it's just a method, and we can reverse it
again if we decide it doesn't work.

If you decide that the political side of Debian is irrelevant, then you
should feel free to ignore all that and focus on your packages. I don't
think that's wrong! The technical side of the project is probably the
most important one, and while you should of course not complain if the
politics aren't going your way if you decide not to partake in them, I
don't think you should be in any way required to be part of it, or be
ashamed if you think it's not for you.

Our voting system is just a slightly more formal way of essentially the
same thing as asking people to raise their hands during a keynote talk
at debconf, after all.

-- 
 w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}

+1, all fine (Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results)

[Holger Levsen]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 04:59:35PM +0100, Philip Hands wrote:
> Personally, I think it's totally fine for decisions to be made by those
> of us that feel like we have an opinion, and for those that don't feel
> the need to vote to trust that the outcome from that will be reasonable.
> 
> I don't see how encouraging people to vote who lack either an opinion on
> the subject in hand, or the motivation to vote, is supposed to improve
> the outcome.

agreed on both paragraphs. I also think the amount of participation for this
particular vote was good enough.

(and I'm thankful Russ will be monitoring future GRs to see how these changes
perform in real life.)


-- 
cheers,
Holger

 ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
 ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  holger@(debian|reproducible-builds|layer-acht).org
 ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀  OpenPGP: B8BF54137B09D35CF026FE9D 091AB856069AAA1C
 ⠈⠳⣄

This is a pandemic, not a war. People keep dying even if you surrender.


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Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Gunnar Wolf]

Russ Allbery dijo [Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 11:44:16AM -0800]:
> As the person proposing this GR, I think that's a perfectly reasonable
> stance to take, and to be quite honest one of my goals was to *not* give
> people a (negative) motivation to feel like they have to be involved.  My
> explicit goal (with one exception mentioned below) was to address various
> process bugs in a straightforward way consistent with how we've been
> informally behaving anyway.  My hope was that the result would be quite
> boring, and unless you're directly involved in a GR, hopefully no one will
> notice.
> 
> The exception is the change to the maximum discussion length, as
> previously discussed, which is a real, substantive change.  However, not
> everyone is going to have a strong feeling about that one way or the
> other.

I think your GR brought up more than this change -- Clarification of
concepts, such as the "Further Discussion" → "None of the above" or
"Amendments" → "Ballot options" will increase readability of our
processes, and ease the way for newcomers to understand what's going
on.

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Andrey Rahmatullin]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2022 at 12:40:46AM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
> > It's understandable that there is no motivation to choose between two very
> > long and complicated (and similar but maybe not?) changes.
> > 
> 
> True, also (like in my case) I forced myself to find the time to read trough
> it and understand it somewhere in the middle of the night to be able to vote
> at all. Yes, I think voting is important!
> 
> So in general if there are such big and non-obvious changes to documents, I
> think the best option would be  to have (require?) a side by side diff as PDF
> or in some other readable format available. In this case the old document and
> the two propose changes could have been displayed side by side on a few
> landscape pages.  
A diff was provided, at least for the first option, but the changes were
still too big to comprehend easily.

-- 
WBR, wRAR


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Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Russ Allbery]

Bernd Zeimetz  writes:

> So in general if there are such big and non-obvious changes to
> documents, I think the best option would be to have (require?) a side by
> side diff as PDF or in some other readable format available.

Wouter and I attempted to provide that via Salsa diffs, although the
available formatting options may not have included the specific format you
reference.

I don't think any of our templates are currently set up for this, but I
would love to see any proposed future foundational document changes come
in merge request form or some equivalent, with links to available diff
formats in the ballot email message.  Chances are high that Gitlab or some
other Git-based tool will have way more options for showing a diff in a
useful format than I would be able to think up.  I hadn't thought of that
when we started this process, but it became obvious via the process that
this is the most readable representation of the changes.

I'm not sure what to do about the GR itself.  Ideally, I think the merge
request would be the text of the GR apart from any pre-amble or motivation
section.  I wrote the GR itself as essentially a set of change
instructions, which was somewhat laborious to do and not very readable,
and I was quite worried that I would accidentally introduce some
inconsistency between the change instructions and the merge request that
would sneak through unnoticed.  It would be nice to not have to describe a
change in two different ways and try to keep them in sync.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Bernd Zeimetz]

On Mon, 2022-01-31 at 19:42 +0500, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:
> 
> It's understandable that there is no motivation to choose between two very
> long and complicated (and similar but maybe not?) changes.
> 

True, also (like in my case) I forced myself to find the time to read trough
it and understand it somewhere in the middle of the night to be able to vote
at all. Yes, I think voting is important!

So in general if there are such big and non-obvious changes to documents, I
think the best option would be  to have (require?) a side by side diff as PDF
or in some other readable format available. In this case the old document and
the two propose changes could have been displayed side by side on a few
landscape pages.  

-- 
 Bernd ZeimetzDebian GNU/Linux Developer
 http://bzed.dehttp://www.debian.org
 GPG Fingerprint: ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485  DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 10:31:54AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:41:51PM +0100, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> > On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:23:35PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > > As of this writing, the tally sheet is still the dummy tally sheet, and 
> > > it has not been replaced with the real one.
> > 
> > I don't see a problem. This looks like the real tally sheet:
> > https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt
> > 
> > There is a dummy tally sheet at:
> > https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_resolution_process/tally.txt
> > 
> > I'm not sure the real one ever got published there.
> 
> In that case, the problem is that the links to the tally sheet still
> point to the dummy sheet; if you go to the vote's page, then click on
> the "statistics" link, and next on the "tally sheet" one, you get the
> dummy tally sheet.

So there are 2 pages:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_resolution_process/

If you're on the first one, all links you find should point to the
official results, with the correct tally sheet.

Note that during the vote, the link on the first page that
says statistics points to the 2nd page, but that's not the case anymore
after the results have been published, and statistics are on
www.debian.org.

If you're on the 2nd site, you'll currently get dummy tally sheet.
It seems that somewhere between 2019 and 2020 something broke and the
dummy sheet was not replaced with the real one after the vote.


Kurt

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Russ Allbery]

Marc Haber  writes:

> The one we just had was tl;dr to me. The people pushing it gave me zero
> motivation to read it, I spent my spare time on my packages.

As the person proposing this GR, I think that's a perfectly reasonable
stance to take, and to be quite honest one of my goals was to *not* give
people a (negative) motivation to feel like they have to be involved.  My
explicit goal (with one exception mentioned below) was to address various
process bugs in a straightforward way consistent with how we've been
informally behaving anyway.  My hope was that the result would be quite
boring, and unless you're directly involved in a GR, hopefully no one will
notice.

The exception is the change to the maximum discussion length, as
previously discussed, which is a real, substantive change.  However, not
everyone is going to have a strong feeling about that one way or the
other.

I for one will be watching closely to see if the new maximum discussion
length causes problems in practice, since I understand the basis for
Wouter's concern, and if it seems like it's causing significant issues,
consider proposing another GR to fix it.  But we'll need to go through a
few GRs first to see how it goes.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)  

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Marc Haber]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 03:31:12PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
> I think its a bit sad that even in Debian the motivation to vote seems to be
> pretty low. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
> people to vote.

Generally, I tend to vote when I see a technical benefit or when I see
the vote as really important such as the DPL. I tend not to vote for
purely political things that I do not care about. Debian has become way
to political in the last years after losing its technical leadership
role.

In addition, I find English to be quite unsuitable for legal documents.
English legalese is almost impossible to read for me. Debian GRs, even
the technical ones, are almost always incomprehensible legalese after a
bunch of highly intelligent people have pondered on the wording for
weeks.

The one we just had was tl;dr to me. The people pushing it gave me zero
motivation to read it, I spent my spare time on my packages.

Greetings
Marc

-- 
-
Marc Haber | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
Leimen, Germany|  lose things."Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 6224 1600402
Nordisch by Nature |  How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 6224 1600421

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Thomas Hochstein]

Wouter Verhelst schrieb:

> In that case, the problem is that the links to the tally sheet still
> point to the dummy sheet; if you go to the vote's page, then click on
> the "statistics" link, and next on the "tally sheet" one, you get the
> dummy tally sheet.

I don't (neither yesterday nor today).

At , the "tally
sheet" link in the third sentence links to the correct tally sheet.

If you follow the link in the first sentence to the statistics page at
, the "tally sheet" link
there also links to the correct tally sheet.

Maybe you have some stale content cached somewhere?

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Felix Lechner]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 8:00 AM Philip Hands  wrote:
>
> I don't see how encouraging people to vote who lack either an opinion on
> the subject in hand, or the motivation to vote, is supposed to improve
> the outcome.

Yeah, I think it's based on mathematics.

On average, higher turnout reduces the sampling error: "The error (or
disturbance) of an observed value is the deviation of the observed
value from the (unobservable) true value of a quantity of interest."
[1]

Kind regards
Felix Lechner

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errors_and_residuals

List of voters (was: Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results)

[Laura Arjona Reina]

Hi all

El 31/1/22 a las 16:59, Philip Hands escribió:

Felix Lechner  writes:


Hi,

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 6:37 AM Bernd Zeimetz  wrote:


I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
people to vote.


>From Wikipedia's page on 'Get Out the Vote': [1]

 "GOTV is often most effective when potential voters are told to do
 so "because others will ask." Voters will then go to the polls as a
 means of fulfilling perceived societal expectations. Paradoxically,
 informing voters that turnout is expecting to be high was found to
 increase actual voter turnout, while predicting lower turnouts
 actually resulted in less voters.

The red bar chart in the same article indicates something similar.
Perhaps we should publish a list of actual voters afterwards, without
their choices, or award badges on Salsa?


Something like this, perhaps?

   https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt



A list of voters was also able to be found in contributors.debian.org:

https://contributors.debian.org/source/vote.debian.org/

At some moment the submissions stopped, and the issue was reported:

https://salsa.debian.org/nm-team/contributors.debian.org/-/issues/29

I have no idea about how to fix that, I guess contacting the Data Source 
maintainers:

https://contributors.debian.org/source/vote.debian.org/members/

or adding oneself as maintainer and try to fix the data submissions.

Kind regards,
--
Laura Arjona Reina
https://wiki.debian.org/LauraArjona

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Philip Hands]

Felix Lechner  writes:

> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 6:37 AM Bernd Zeimetz  wrote:
>>
>> I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
>> people to vote.
>
>>From Wikipedia's page on 'Get Out the Vote': [1]
>
> "GOTV is often most effective when potential voters are told to do
> so "because others will ask." Voters will then go to the polls as a
> means of fulfilling perceived societal expectations. Paradoxically,
> informing voters that turnout is expecting to be high was found to
> increase actual voter turnout, while predicting lower turnouts
> actually resulted in less voters.
>
> The red bar chart in the same article indicates something similar.
> Perhaps we should publish a list of actual voters afterwards, without
> their choices, or award badges on Salsa?

Something like this, perhaps?

  https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt

Personally, I think it's totally fine for decisions to be made by those
of us that feel like we have an opinion, and for those that don't feel
the need to vote to trust that the outcome from that will be reasonable.

I don't see how encouraging people to vote who lack either an opinion on
the subject in hand, or the motivation to vote, is supposed to improve
the outcome.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,GERMANY


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Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Felix Lechner]

Hi,

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 6:37 AM Bernd Zeimetz  wrote:
>
> I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
> people to vote.

>From Wikipedia's page on 'Get Out the Vote': [1]

"GOTV is often most effective when potential voters are told to do
so "because others will ask." Voters will then go to the polls as a
means of fulfilling perceived societal expectations. Paradoxically,
informing voters that turnout is expecting to be high was found to
increase actual voter turnout, while predicting lower turnouts
actually resulted in less voters.

The red bar chart in the same article indicates something similar.
Perhaps we should publish a list of actual voters afterwards, without
their choices, or award badges on Salsa?

In the present case, however, I agree with wRAR  and zigo that this GR
was especially dry.

I would even argue that the mechanics of voting have no place in the
constitution. It would be a more successful and more inspiring
document if it were to capture our excitement of producing the best
free operating system in the world.

Kind regards
Felix Lechner

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_out_the_vote

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Thomas Goirand]

On 1/31/22 15:42, Andrey Rahmatullin wrote:

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 03:31:12PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:

The details of the results are available at:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003


I think its a bit sad that even in Debian the motivation to vote seems to be
pretty low. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
people to vote.

It's understandable that there is no motivation to choose between two very
long and complicated (and similar but maybe not?) changes.


Yeah. The wording is kind of hard (and boring) to read.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Andrey Rahmatullin]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 03:31:12PM +0100, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:
> > The details of the results are available at:
> > https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003
> 
> I think its a bit sad that even in Debian the motivation to vote seems to be
> pretty low. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
> people to vote.
It's understandable that there is no motivation to choose between two very
long and complicated (and similar but maybe not?) changes.

-- 
WBR, wRAR


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Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Hi,

> The details of the results are available at:
> https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003

I think its a bit sad that even in Debian the motivation to vote seems to be
pretty low. I'm wondering if there is anything we can do to motivate more
people to vote.


Bernd


-- 
 Bernd ZeimetzDebian GNU/Linux Developer
 http://bzed.dehttp://www.debian.org
 GPG Fingerprint: ECA1 E3F2 8E11 2432 D485  DD95 EB36 171A 6FF9 435F

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:41:51PM +0100, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:23:35PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > As of this writing, the tally sheet is still the dummy tally sheet, and it 
> > has not been replaced with the real one.
> 
> I don't see a problem. This looks like the real tally sheet:
> https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt
> 
> There is a dummy tally sheet at:
> https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_resolution_process/tally.txt
> 
> I'm not sure the real one ever got published there.

In that case, the problem is that the links to the tally sheet still
point to the dummy sheet; if you go to the vote's page, then click on
the "statistics" link, and next on the "tally sheet" one, you get the
dummy tally sheet.

-- 
 w@uter.{be,co.za}
wouter@{grep.be,fosdem.org,debian.org}

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Kurt Roeckx]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 11:23:35PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> As of this writing, the tally sheet is still the dummy tally sheet, and it 
> has not been replaced with the real one.

I don't see a problem. This looks like the real tally sheet:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003_tally.txt

There is a dummy tally sheet at:
https://vote.debian.org/~secretary/gr_resolution_process/tally.txt

I'm not sure the real one ever got published there.


Kurt

Re: General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Wouter Verhelst]

As of this writing, the tally sheet is still the dummy tally sheet, and it has 
not been replaced with the real one.

What's happening?
-- 
Verstuurd vanaf mijn Android apparaat met K-9 Mail. Excuseer mijn beknoptheid.

General Resolution: Change the resolution process: results

[Debian Project Secretary - Kurt Roeckx]

Hi,

The winner of the General Resolution is:
Choice 1: "Amend resolution process, set maximum discussion period"

The details of the results are available at:
https://www.debian.org/vote/2021/vote_003


Kurt Roeckx
Debian Project Secretary



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