thank you very much for proposing these changes. Overall they are very convincing and would already vote for it today, but there are two things
that I wonder:
- (Not just to you:) Would it be possible to test them in real befoe
adopting them? Maybe with some kind of role-playing game where some
random people are assigned adversarial roles?
- About the sponsors, if there are too many, then the proposer is more
at risk to face vetos when accepting amendments. (I write that as I
accepted major changes as the proposer of a GR option some years
ago.) Would it make sense to limit the total number of sponsors, and
to only allow developers to sponsor one option ?
Charles> - About the sponsors, if there are too many, then the
Charles> proposer is more at risk to face vetos when accepting
Charles> amendments. (I write that as I accepted major changes as
Charles> the proposer of a GR option some years ago.) Would it make
Charles> sense to limit the total number of sponsors, and to only
Charles> allow developers to sponsor one option ?
I don't understand this concern very well.
If some of your sponsors don't like an amendment you accepted you can withdraw.
So long as you have k sponsors remaining, the option can stay on the
ballot.
What am I missing that leads to your concern?
Probably the simplest fix would be to add something like this as a newGiven that any Developer can propose a new ballot option anyway, it
point A.0.3. Do people think it would be worth adding something like
this?
If a proposal (or ballot option; see section §A.1) requires some
number of sponsors N, only the first N Developers indicating they
sponsor the proposal become sponsors for the purposes of the
subsequent process. Further sponsorships are not counted. Similarly,
if more sponsors are needed (such as in cases of withdrawal; see
section §A.2), only the number of Developers required to meet the
minimum number of sponsors are added as sponsors. The Project
Secretary determines the order in which sponsors indicate support.
(I'm really not happy with the wording of that, and am finding it
difficult to word clearly for some reason. Suggestions welcome, if folks >think this is something the proposal should try to address.)
"Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
It sounds like what russ and Charles are talking about is the following:
* You as a proposer want to accept an amendment
* A sponsor objects, and so you can't even though you would have been
able to if you had fewer sponsors.
I have an alternate proposed fix:
If the proposer accepts the amendment and there are k sponsors who have
not objected, the amendment is accepted.
(I think it's okay even if we end up counting new sponsors to get to k
who have not objected)
But under Russ's approach, the whole amendment process is really just a convenience to make it easier to update an option with less withdrawing
and re-proposing.
Once a proposal has been sponsored and added to the ballot, we, as aI must say I find your reasoning convincing. A certain stability of
general social convention, stop sponsoring it unless it feels particularly >important to be listed as a sponsor. That means that any given option >currently on the ballot usually has "hidden" support in the form of >Developers who intend to vote for it but haven't sponsored it. It seems >likely that in some situations those Developers may think "okay, the
opinion I really cared about is on the ballot so I can vote the way I
want" and then may tune out the subsequent discussion.
In other words, I think once a ballot option makes it onto the ballot, the >rules are attempting to capture the sense that it no longer belongs just
to its proposer, but now represents some unknown number of people who want
to vote for it.
Given that, if the proposer changes their mind and wants to propose a >substantially different ballot option, I think the default should be that
the proposer do that as a separate ballot option and get sponsors for that >new ballot option (and possibly withdraw as the proposer for the original >ballot option). This reflects the fact that just because the proposer >changed their mind, that doesn't mean that other supporters of that ballot >option also changed their minds.
As Sam says, the ability to make substantive changes if all sponsors agree
is essentially an optimization. It's tedious to propose a new option,
have everyone sponsor it again, withdraw as proposer of the old option,
and confirm that no one else is stepping forward, so for changes that >everyone agrees make the ballot option better, we should have a way to
allow those to be made more easily. But we want some sort of check that
this is really true and not just take the proposer's word for it, so we in >essence draft the sponsors of the ballot option as referees to decide
whether this change does make sense in the context in which they
originally supported that option.
Once a proposal has been sponsored and added to the ballot, we, as a
general social convention, stop sponsoring it unless it feels particularly important to be listed as a sponsor.
In other words, I think once a ballot option makes it onto the ballot, the rules are attempting to capture the sense that it no longer belongs just
to its proposer, but now represents some unknown number of people who want
to vote for it.
Once people who have sponsored the original ballot option start
objecting, I think we should take that as concrete evidence that the
new option is sufficiently different that it may not represent the
people who were supporting the old option, and we should therefore
default to adding the new option via the normal mechanism.
This paragraph helped me realize that you see my proposal as a
substantive change over the current rules for the original GR proposer.
I hadn't entirely realized that it was, and I see that I missed some
subtlety in current rules, so I went back and reviewed them. I believe
the implications of the current constitution (which I think was also in effect in 2008) are:
1. The original proposer of the GR can only change the text themselves if
all the sponsors agree (A.1.5)
here are comments from my point of view in the hope of being useful,
please do not take them as objections; I know that you have looked at
the problem through many more angles than I did. By the way, sorry in advance if what I write today has been already addressed by others
earlier.
Le Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 08:26:00AM -0800, Russ Allbery a écrit :
Once a proposal has been sponsored and added to the ballot, we, as a
general social convention, stop sponsoring it unless it feels
particularly important to be listed as a sponsor.
This practice of sponsoring over the necessary number has always made me uncomfortable. The more we give importance to the question of who
sponsored, the more we put social pressure on the voters. This is
another reason why I think that limiting strictly to 5 would be better.
This said, anonymous voting (which I think is better to decide in a
separate GR) would solve that problem entirely.
In other words, I think once a ballot option makes it onto the ballot,
the rules are attempting to capture the sense that it no longer belongs
just to its proposer, but now represents some unknown number of people
who want to vote for it.
My conclusion with the 2008 GR is that removing the original option made
it a better GR. The removal triggered the addition of new options, but
none of them were identical to the original one. Perhaps it would have happened also even if sponsors had a veto, but I believe that personal responsibility is going to be more efficient than collective
intelligence there.
Fraknly speaking, I worry that some day somebody will sponsor as many
options as possible and object to changes for the sake of adding
toxicity to GR. The more members we have, the less unlikely it becomes.
But even assuming good will, I think that a process that makes it easier
to remove or merge options would serve us better than a process that
makes it easier to fork options. A lot of GR voters do not follow the debates on debian-vote, and with too many options, possibly all written
in different styles, there is an increased risk of voting for the
contrary of what we want.
Timo> I must say I find your reasoning convincing. A certain"Timo" == Timo Röhling <roehling@debian.org> writes:
Some of the objections that I've seen after recent GRs to complex ballots
are actually objections to relying on the clone-proof nature of the voting system, or arguments that because of human psychology it's not really clone-proof because people get confused. I admit to being somewhat
dubious of those arguments (they're often based on the supposed unreasonableness of voting patterns that I find entirely reasonable and rational), but, more to the point for this proposal, I think I'm going to plead "out of scope" for the changes that I'm trying to make. I don't
think this alteration of the process will make the problem of having too
many ballot options any worse (and hopefully the above is a convincing argument for why I feel that way), and I'd rather leave trying to make it better as a subject for another GR.
Charles> One last question: in some complex GRs there were"Charles" == Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
One last question: in some complex GRs there were discussions about
problems caused by mixing 1:1 and 3:1 majority options, which frankly speaking I could not undertand because I never studied our Condorcet
method in details. Do you think that such mixes can be problemating and
does your proposal address that ?
we could (and did) say that option [FD] gets dropped.
So in the situation above, "The DFSG is great" wins even though more
people would have preferred to replace the DFSG than to say it was
great.
On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 9:01 AM Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> wrote:
we could (and did) say that option [FD] gets dropped.
So in the situation above, "The DFSG is great" wins even though more
people would have preferred to replace the DFSG than to say it was
great.
Would option (2) win here even if it did not affirm the DFSG but
instead sought to alter it in a way distinct from option (1)?
This problem only applies if there are some options requiring a
supermajority and other options that require a simple majority.
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