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

[Rich Freeman]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In an ideal world Comrel and QA appeals would always fail, because the
original body made the decision the Council would back.  Having
Council members on these bodies only increases the odds of this
happening, and IMO should be seen as a good thing.  The only challenge
is for the individuals involved to manage the workload, and that
should be at their discretion.

-- 
Rich