[vote draft] Voting procedure #205
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Signed-off-by: Douglas Stebila <[email protected]>
governance/voting_procedure.md
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| - The outcome of the vote should have some effect on the contents of the TSC repository, such as editing an existing file or adding a new file to record or implement the policy decision being made. | ||
| 4. Motions may be submitted as a draft PR to solicit discussion or feedback or changes, and then converted into a full PR once the motion is ready for a vote. | ||
| 5. When the motion is ready for a vote, the TSC chair will request PR reviews from all voting TSC members. Members can vote in favour by approving the pull request or leaving a comment indicating their approval; members can vote opposed by leaving a comment indicating their disapproval. | ||
| 6. The motion will be considered passed once a majority of TSC members, excluding the chair, have voted in favour. |
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Passing a motion only when a majority votes in favour risks deadlock to the project (when sufficient voting members don't care to vote; technical contributions are going down, so administrative contributions such as this may as well). I'd therefore suggest rephrasing 6 as follows:
The motion will be considered passed once a majority of voting TSC members have voted in favour within 3 weeks of the vote (PR) being opened or once a majority of TSC members have voted in favour, whichever occurs earlier.
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@baentsch, wouldn’t a deadlock mean that the motion failed? To ensure certainty, we could simply state that a deadlock would necessitate revisiting the discussion and a revote, after which the result would be final.
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wouldn’t a deadlock mean that the motion failed?
That's precisely the point: A motion would fail when "enough" members are not sufficiently interested (or following "behind closed doors" interests not) to participate; I'm not sure that a further discussion then helps: People not interested to vote (or state their opinion openly by GH before) won't be likely to state their opinion if they can make a motion fail by just not voting.
we could simply state that a deadlock would necessitate revisiting the discussion and a revote, after which the result would be final
But the revote would have to follow different rules then to not again allow non-voting members an option to "silently" stop a motion. My argument is to not permit this to begin with and allow the project to move forward faster again (by clearly stating "whoever doesn't have time to vote within x days/weeks doesn't get to influence the decision").
Signed-off-by: Douglas Stebila <[email protected]>
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Tagging the rest of @open-quantum-safe/tsc for discussion on this issue. In particular, do you want to see a mechanism by which motions that, after a certain period of time (e.g., 3 weeks), have not achieved quorum but have received more yes votes than no votes, are considered passed? If we can get some clear direction on this in say the next week, we can finalize some language and put this to a vote. |
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I don't have strong opinions about this, as we haven't historically hit deadlocks or other issues when it comes to voting (have we?), therefore the proposed PR text and comments modifications are fine with me. Get something going and we can always revisit if we face actual issues. |
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I'm also fine with the procedure, including the addition that @baentsch proposes. Just a small wording tweak to consider:
Instead of saying "voting TSC members", I'd suggest using "TSC members who cast a vote" to avoid any misunderstanding that only a subset of TSC members have voting rights. |
This attempts to codify our current TSC voting procedure.
Fixes #12.