#24 Allow other Fedora Groups to use the voting system
Closed: Fixed None Opened 15 years ago by nigelj.

Just to keep a note here about it:

Kevin (nirik) queried if the irc-support group could use the voting system to hold votes for themselves that are unrelated to board votes etc.

This opens the door to a new feature where we have 'official' and 'unofficial' elections, for instance a Board election would be considered Official and would appear on the main page, but a irc-support group vote would be unofficial and appear on a page off the main page.

It would also lower the permissions required to create such elections to something like:

Create election requires would require either group: elections (official elections), or, group administrator of groups allowed to vote (unofficial elections) - extra groups could be added by 'elections' members if a case is made.

This requires (for a totally self managed solution) that we go to a system where the UI is nicer (#8) and elections can be closed out by the election administrator.

Kevin: What do you think?


Per [wiki:Fedora13Target] setting Milestone to Release 0.5.0

I'm very concerned that Fedora not fall into the morass of Debian-style voting for everything. The ability to set up ad-hoc elections to decide any random issue would tend to upset what is supposed to be meritocracy at every possible level. I'm not saying democratic voting is inherently evil. It's useful when you have an election about people, as opposed to policies or ways to operate. I see three main problems with voting on operations:

  1. It avoids accountability. Team leaders are there to lead, which means listening to the group, establishing consensus, and making calls where needed knowing that you can't please 100% of the people 100% of the time.

  2. It removes the need, and the ability, to justify arguments. If voters simply put in +/-1 with no context provided, there's no way to judge hard vs. soft opinions, nor how important that matter is to the voter.

  3. It tends to be anti-meritocracy. We have a fairly open account process, so it's easy to obtain and hold group membership without daily involvement in the work of that group. Group membership is a switch -- it's on or off, without an indicator of how involved a particular user is. It's therefore very easy for uninvolved people who have a strong opinion to upset the will of other people who are heavily involved (and invested).

When we vote for people, these concerns are balanced out by the personal aspect -- a lengthy discussion about a particular person would be counter-productive, as opposed to issues that concern voters. But for issues and policies, voting should be avoided wherever possible in favor of a more meritocratic process -- consensus-building and informed, sensitive team leadership.

Our intended use was to add/remove people to the irc-support-operators group... ie, a majority vote to add or remove someone nominated.

We didn't intend to use it for operational issues, but to vote on people. ;)

So with a small group doing the voting, what separates this case from something like FESCo voting openly on proven packager membership? Should this be done by taking +/-1 in an open meeting?

Indeed, we discussed this at a recent meeting:

http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2010-01-14/irc-support-sig.2010-01-14-16.30.log.html#l-125

and decided to do things pretty much that same way (feedback in list/private, then vote in open meeting). ;)

So, I guess that could make this ticket moot. ;)

Note, this feature would also allow for having different people manage different elections. Not a problem now but could be in the future if, say we have nigelj, stickster, and toshio as the votingadmins but nigelj and stickster are both running for the Board and toshio is running for FESCo. With a separate pool of voting admins per election being run, toshio can admin the Board while stickster and/or nigelj can admin the FESCo election.

Replying to [comment:6 toshio]:

Note, this feature would also allow for having different people manage different elections. Not a problem now but could be in the future if, say we have nigelj, stickster, and toshio as the votingadmins but nigelj and stickster are both running for the Board and toshio is running for FESCo. With a separate pool of voting admins per election being run, toshio can admin the Board while stickster and/or nigelj can admin the FESCo election.

Not quite, from the original ticket description:

Create election requires would require either group: elections (official elections), or, group administrator of groups allowed to vote (unofficial elections) - extra groups could be added by 'elections' members if a case is made.

FESCo/Board/etc would be managed by a 'collective' group - elections like it currently is now.

Version 2.1 allows each elections to have one or more admin groups (ie: the traditional elections group and others) as well as dedicated groups for the voters (empty == cla+1, otherwise the user has to be in one of the groups specified).

This partly fixes this ticket as it still relies on groups but as toshio mentioned above sometime we may want to set it at the individual level.

do we want to tune the settings at the individual level or is group good enough?

It seems to me that group is enough, since in the scenario above an additional group could still be temporarily established as a solution.

Agreed, so let's close this one as fixed.

Thanks for your input :)

Login to comment on this ticket.

Metadata