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

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 1:14 PM Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> 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.
>

I believe in your right to vote and have the content of the vote be
private. I don't believe in your right to vote anonymously in Foundation
elections. The fact that you voted should be public. The foundation has
minimal requirements for membership; if you don't vote in foundation
affairs (1 vote a year!) then I don't see the point in being a member. It's
basically the only difference afforded to members[0]! I don't believe we do
publish a list of who voted in every election, but we do publish a
membership list and there is definitely a correlation and its intentional.


>
> 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.
>

We need to know who cast votes, we don't need to know the content of the
votes. I assume building such a system is possible (maybe it isn't?)


>
> 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'm certainly interested in other avenues of interest, but I don't see very
many in this thread other than "AGM attendance" and "asking people if they
are interested[0]"


>
>
> 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.
>

Attendance of a single meeting per year is a bad idea without some kind of
proxy system in place, same as any corporation.


>
> 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.
>

This doesn't really imply interested in the Foundation either though;
because the developership and Foundation are separate.


>
> 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.
>

The point of tracking who votes is that votes are nominally the only real
difference between members and non-members; so in the end it's one of the
few ways members can express their interest. If we had shares, then owning
those would be an interest; or donations, or funding requests, or some
other idea.

-A

[0] A plausible reality is that most members don't even have 'an interest'
in Foundation affairs and if we increase the minimum requirement for
membership we might see a precipitous drop in member count; we would need
to debate whether or not this is a desired outcome or not.


>
>
> WDYT?
>
> [1]
> https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/message/6977bf6f9b72a17847fdc93afd4d9a9f
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>