Gentoo Archives: gentoo-council

From: Richard Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-council@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-council] Voting by mail
Date: Fri, 26 Feb 2010 13:02:26
Message-Id: 4B87C19D.8090709@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-council] Voting by mail by Denis Dupeyron
1 On 02/25/2010 09:42 PM, Denis Dupeyron wrote:
2 > In a few words here is the problem. Is it a good idea to allow council
3 > members to vote by email when they're not able to make it to the
4 > meeting?
5
6 How the council wants to run itself should really be up to each council
7 - the devs elected them, and I'm not sure we really need a GLSA/etc to
8 govern how it operates beyond the general charter.
9
10 Personally, I've found that board meetings tend to work best when
11 they're just formalizations of decisions that have already been made.
12 If an item needs discussion, then it should be discussed, and probably
13 not voted unless there is a rush (since in theory everybody should think
14 about it and maybe allow for general dev input). If an item needs
15 voting, then it should be voted, and not discussed (since discussion
16 should have taken place on lists/etc).
17
18 Of course, in a crisis you just do what needs to be done, and chances
19 are you're not in a scheduled meeting anyway.
20
21 If somebody wants to convince the council of something, they're best off
22 writing up a concise argument and sending it to the list. Some items
23 are complex enough to require interactive discussion, but in that case
24 time should be set aside for it, and there shouldn't necessarily be an
25 expectation that a vote take place immediately afterwards. If somebody
26 wants to just read the irc logs and email in a vote later, I'm not sure
27 that really is an abdication of responsibility.
28
29 With gentoo spanning so many timezones, and with the desire to have
30 exceptional people as leaders, we do need to recognize that it isn't
31 always possible for people to be in-person at meetings. If we really
32 want "the best" to lead gentoo, then we need to recognize that these
33 sorts of people often have a lot of other things going on as well, and
34 making a meeting at 10AM on a work day, or 3AM on a weekend, or whatever
35 might not always be possible. We really need to make the most of tools
36 like email/forums/etc and when we are meeting in-person we should treat
37 that time as being very precious.
38
39 Just some thoughts - every team needs to work out the rules they work
40 best under. I wouldn't expect every council to work in the same way as
41 the current one, and if people leave and join the current council needs
42 to take into account whether it needs to change.
43
44 Rich