Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: council members and appeals

[William Hubbs]

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 06:20:06PM -0500, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 5:42 PM, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > I feel that council members should not be members of projects whose
> > actions can be appealed to the council like qa or comrel. I have felt
> > this way for a long time, because I think it compromises the full
> > council's ability to vote fairly on appeals.
> >
> > Thoughts?
> >
>
> IMO while this seems to be a popular sentiment it misses the point of
> why organizations have appeals, and seems to be based on some kind of
> incorrect notion that people making decisions automatically have a
> conflict of interest when hearing appeals of these decisions.
 
 I disagree, and since you are talking about the US court system, I'll
 use that in my arguments.

> The concept behind appeals is that you have a group at the top that is
> most trusted to make decisions, and they generally set policy, but
> this policy is first enacted by lower tiers of the organization
> because it would be impractical to have the most trusted body hear
> every case.
 
 Yes, we agree on this. I agree that the council is supposed to be the
 most trusted body that is in charge of high level policies/decisions.
 In my mind, in terms of appeals, that makes it more like the Supreme
 Court in the US.

> Appeals sometimes reverse decisions because these lower groups are
> imperfect at enacting the policies set at the top, or they are
> operating in areas where no precedent exists.  These reversals
> shouldn't be seen as some kind of checks/balances system that adds
> value, but an inefficiency that wastes time deliberating matters more
> than once.  It is necessary only because it would be even more
> inefficient to slow everything down to a pace where one small group
> could deal with it all.
 
 I agree that the higher body should not be involved in every case;
 However, I absolutely do not agree that appeals are not a
 checks/balances system. If someone appeals something it means that they
feel that the decision made by the lower body needs to be re-examined.
If the higher body then overrules the lower body, it isn't meant in a
shameful way, it is just guidance for the lower body in the future.

> So, if there were no QA or comrel, and there were just the council,
> and it handled everything and there were no appeals at all, this would
> not lower the quality of decisions, but it would actually raise them
> (since some incorrect decisions might not be appealed).  However, it
> would come at a cost of a lot less stuff getting done since you'd have
> reducing the pool of labor.
 
 Rich, I don't follow this logic at all.

> Some organizations find a compromise where a decision might be made by
> a subset of a trusted group, and then be appealable to the entirety of
> the group.  This is common in appellate courts in the US, for example,
> where out of the entire group of judges a small panel is chosen to
> hear each case, with the decisions being appealable to the entire
> group.  In these situations the same judges get to vote again in the
> full panel despite having already rendered a decision in the previous
> panel.  This isn't viewed as a conflict of interest, because the
> judges were not motivated out of personal interest in the first place.
> There is no shame in having a decision reversed because it usually is
> a result of unclear precedent.  On  the second hearing a judge is free
> to either change their opinion or keep their previous one.

I know about the appellate courts, but there are other levels as well.
You would never find a district courte judge on an appellate court
simultaneously, and you would never find an appellate court judge or
district courte judge serving simultaneously as a justice on the Supreme Court.

William