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  • From: Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>
  • To: SM Discuss <sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] voting process
  • Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 21:34:29 -0800 (PST)

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On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
On Feb 09, Sergey A. Lipnevich [sergey AT sourcemage.org] wrote:
Jeremy Blosser (emrys) wrote:
The IRC discussions I've seen on this have only referenced past discussions
about the voting process which I believe primarily took place on the ML.
Reference is usually made to people being opposed due to the potential for
"intimidation" or "vote buying"; these are standard objections to open
voting systems in political circles, I don't know if anyone has experienced
anything like that here (I don't think so) or if it's a theoretical
objection.


I have a strong feeling that becoming more political is definitely not
going to help SMGL more forward. There's nothing political in personal
conflicts (and we have a share of these), they can be resolved without
hiding from each other and behind somebody or something else. But,
politics is about power and resources, so I assume that too many people
are concerned that they don't have enough power.

I doubt anyone would say "I want SMGL to become more political". By
"political" I only mean the most basic definition: we have leads, we have
authority figures, there are elections. Yes, leads wield power, that
doesn't mean there's necessarily anything nefarious if people experience
peer pressure.

One point, in my mind, is that whether or not people feel pressured to
vote/not vote/vote for a particular person through peer pressure (or
otherwise), I would like to keep an environment where that can't even
happen, which is not through open voting. Even if everyone here today
agrees that they are fine with open voting (which I am otherwise in
favour of), what about our next guru, or the one after, etc.? That's
what I'd like to avoid and the proposed (or modifications to it)
method of auditing our votes would let us keep the confidentiality
while letting those who don't trust (or just like to double check ;))
the person doing the tallying audit the votes.

I'm trying to keep our votes from /becoming/ political by allowing
auditing so we can say, 'yes, this person did indeed get this many
votes' and that no one can say they were coerced into voting for
someone they didn't want.

It's a very bad thing in itself, because in FOSS the degree of power is
usually determined by the community, and not assigned. If the community
cannot determine the worthiness of any participant openly and we are too
suspicious or afraid of one another, we're frankly speaking not a very
healthy community.

Be that as it may, remember that the *current process* is closed voting.
It was open before, and this changed due to various feedback and
discussions which are logged in the ML archives and elsewhere. For that to
change would require the people that requested and got it changed before to
have their minds changed.

That is a separate issue from the one the original mail was meant to
address: the current process also has no way to be audited. Auditability
is both inseparable from the closed voting system that causes it, and also
an issue that can be dealt with on its own. That is, whether or not we can
have open votes, we at least need to be able to audit our votes.

Do others have comments on the original proposal? Particularly those in
favor of closed voting, since this is essentially proposed as a compromise
between those that want anonymous votes and those that want auditability?

As long as we keep the auditing process simple while maintaining
anonymity I think that would be fine.

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall | Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us | http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/ | SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/ #196285 | http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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