[gentoo-nfp] [RFC] Alternative methods for determining 'interest in Foundation affairs'

[Michał Górny]

Hi, everyone.

As some of you have read, I have proposed a new privacy-oriented voting
frontend for Gentoo [1].  However, the whole idea was rendered pretty
much pointless by Trustees demanding information on who cast a vote. 
This is currently used to determine 'interest in Foundation',
and therefore kick inactive Foundation members.  To be honest, I think
it's misguided, for three reasons:

1. It intrudes on privacy of voters.  I suppose it's not *that major*
but still I don't think it's appropriate to publish a 'shame list' of
people who haven't voted for whatever reason.

2. It introduces a big weakness in the system.  My whole idea was to
make it practically impossible to sniff votes after the election is
prepared.  With this solution, anyone with sufficient privileges
(election officials, infra) can trivially passively sniff votes.

3. It is really meaningless.  Casting a vote does not really indicate
any interest in GF.  It only indicates that someone has done the minimal
effort to avoid being kicked.  There is no reason to conflate the two.


I believe we should consider other options of determining activity. 
Depending on whether we actually want to keep people actually interested
in GF, or just those caring enough to stay, I can think of a few
options.

The most obvious solution would be to take AGM attendance as indication
of interest.  It would also create an interest in actually attending,
and make it possible to finally reach a quorum.  However, it's rather
a poor idea given that AGMs tend to happen in middle of the night for
European devs.  We would probably have to accept excuses for not
attending, and then measuring attendance will probably be meaningless
anyway.

Another option (which some people aren't going to like) is to require
all Foundation members to be Gentoo devs (but not the other way around),
and then terminate GF membership along with developer status.  Given
that there's only a few non-dev members, and most of them are retired
devs whose membership simply didn't terminate by existing rules yet, I
think there shouldn't really be a problem in making the few interested
members non-commit devs by existing rules.

Finally, if we really don't care we could just send pings and terminate
membership of people that don't answer in time.  This is pretty much
similar to the current idea with voting, except it doesn't pretend to be
meaningful.


WDYT?

[1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/6977bf6f9b72a17847fdc93afd4d9a9f

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny