Dale <rdalek1967@...> posted 4A47F8E3.8070703@..., excerpted
below, on  Sun, 28 Jun 2009 18:12:35 -0500:

> As a long time Gentoo user, I have to ask.  Why is that EVERYONE on the
> council must be there or have someone there to represent them?  Would
> Gentoo come to a end if one person or even two people were not present?

I believe the fear is in ultimately having a very small group of people 
(say 1-3) vote in something agreed among themselves, that the rest of the 
community doesn't agree with.  Gentoo devs tend to be a rather 
independent lot, and they don't want that risk.  That's the reason the 
council is seven members instead of say, five or three, as well.  With a 
three person council it's really easy to get just two acting in cahoots, 
and with five, getting a third person isn't that much harder.  A seven 
member council means in ordered for something to pass, at least four 
members must agree, and there's a lot of developers for whom that's 
simply the minimum number they can trust to make a reasonable decision.

From that viewpoint, if anyone's absent without proxy, it lowers the 
"safe" level dramatically, because it's just too easy to persuade one or 
two other folks to vote with you, even if they don't share your ulterior 
motive.  So the idea is to keep the number of votes to seven, so the 
number necessary for a majority is always a reasonably safe four.

> I do agree that if a proxy is going to be used, they should be a
> developer.  If it is not that way now, it should be changed.  I been
> using Gentoo for years and wouldn't even consider serving as a proxy.  I
> would certainly not want to be a tie breaker on a vote.

I agree.  If I read GLEP 39 correctly, however, the reason it wasn't 
required that all council members be devs is because they'd be council 
members by virtue of being voted in by devs (being a dev is a requirement 
to vote).  Thus, if a majority of voting devs voted in a Gentoo-non-dev, 
presumably they'd be expressing explicit trust in that non-dev to do the 
right thing.

Of course, the same doesn't apply to proxies, who are single-person 
designated by the to-be-absent council member.  Thus, the safety margin 
doesn't exist there, they were NOT approved by the voting devs as a 
whole, or even the council as a whole, and it's certainly a reasonable 
argument that because of that, they should at least be devs.

However, see my recent post proposing designated proxies, taking the job 
for the full council term of a year.  They could either be voted in as 
running mates along with the (voting) council, or designated and approved 
as the first order of business of the new council.  (Since voting is 
already underway for the new council, it'd have to be designated and 
approved, this year, with the running mate idea perhaps next year if 
thought good.)

That'd eliminate both the unprepared proxy still trying to get up to 
speed on what he's supposed to be voting on, as they'd presumably be as 
prepared as would the regular voting council member, AND the problem of 
non-dev as proxy, since they'd at minimum have been approved by the 
council as a whole, if not voted in, in the same council vote as the 
(voting) council itself.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman