[OpenLayers-Dev] RFC: Resolution to only change License with Unanimous Vote

[Cameron Shorter]

My initial reaction to a wiki record of all votes was "what a great 
idea", but upon thinking further, I've cooled to the idea.

My experience is that most things that go to a vote are usually fairly 
obvious and get a unanimous show support. It gives the proposer an 
acknowledgment they are on the right track.

If there is debate on the issue, the proposal usually modified 2 or 3 
times and re-voted on. Should we record all the votes for the proposal? 
And cut and paste how someone initially said no, then said yes after 
certain conditions were met?

So the cost of recording a vote is probably ~ 15 mins. Is it worth it?

What do we gain? I'm yet to have a need to return to a historic decision 
with a desire to know who voted for what. Maybe it would be useful for 
someone studying the effectiveness of Open Source. I can't think of any 
legal value that we gain above recording votes in an email list.
And for collecting reasons for people voting "-1", this information can 
be collected in the comments section of a wiki RFC already.

Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 12:46:55AM -0500, Erik Uzureau wrote:
>   
>> On 10/9/07, Paul Spencer <pspencer at dmsolutions.ca> wrote:
>>     
>>> Also, I think we should maintain a record of the results of votes.
>>> The way MapGuide runs their PSC.  An RFC is prepared in the wiki, a
>>> link is forwarded to dev for discussion, then after a suitable
>>> waiting period a motion to vote is presented by a PSC member.  After
>>> the vote, the proponent of the RFC updates the list with the voting
>>> record.  For issues like this one, this seems like a bit of overkill
>>> but at least the main text of the RFC and the voting history could be
>>> plunked into the wiki after a vote?
>>>       
>> How do people feel about this? In the past, there have been very few
>> issues which have required a vote -- the majority of the voting has
>> just been for releases so far.
>>     
>
> I think it's important to have a public record of who voted what way on
> a particular question. I don't feel a strong need to have an RFC first
> -- the mailing lists are a fine publicly accessible historical resource
> -- but a short summary and a list of the vote results in the wiki seems
> a great idea.
>
> Our rules for 'no controversial changes without consulting the PSC' not
> requiring many votes simply means that we haven't had many controversial
> changes, as far as I'm concerned. It becomes more of a question for
> things like 'Translation' -- large, sweeping changes that you want
> everyone to agree with ahead of time. In general, I try to break these
> things up into seperate tasks -- so even though I wrote
> http://trac.openlayers.org/wiki/RFC/ParsingAndDisplayingRemoteData as an
> "RFC", I realized that there were parts of it that were simply obvious
> code-deduplication, and doing that is unlikely to make anyone upset (so
> long as the end result is the same on both ends), so I just went ahead
> and wrote the patches.
>
> So, not having lots of votes is cool, but having public records for the
> votes we do have is also cool.
>
> Regards,
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254