Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: [gentoo-council] A Little Council Reform Anyone?

[Richard Freeman]

Luca Barbato wrote:
> Jorge Manuel B. S. Vicetto wrote:
>> I have a few ideas about this that I'll have to put in writing and share
>> later, but let me start by proposing that for such a change we require
>> the support of at least 2/3 of the devs that vote *and* a minimum of 1/3
>> of all devs.
>
> I'd use absolute majority even if it is more strict.
>

The only concern I have with these kinds of approaches is that right now 
we tend to be pretty liberal with allowing people to be devs even if 
they aren't heavily involved in gentoo.  As long as their commits are of 
sufficient quality that isn't a big deal.  However, it does allow the 
voting rolls to get pretty big with people that don't have a huge stake 
in the outcome of an election.

Organizations that tend to have supermajority policies tend to have 
other kinds of requirements on dues or activity, and they also tend to 
routinely clean out their rolls.  A supermajority policy might work fine 
if we also had a policy that a dev who fails to vote in two consecutive 
elections gets the boot.  I'm not sure that we really want that kind of 
a policy, however.

My feeling is that if you don't care enough to vote, you should have to 
live with the consequences.  Now, all elections of any kind should be 
announced well in advance, and should span a period of a few weeks (as 
they currently do).  If an issue is particularly critical and nobody can 
get around to voting for it in a 2 weeks span while there are hundreds 
of arguments raging in IRC and the lists, then I'm not sure we can take 
their silence as a vote of disapproval.