[Qgis-psc] Voting for grants

[Alessandro Pasotti]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2020 at 9:16 AM Matthias Kuhn <matthias at opengis.ch> wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
> On 5/30/20 1:21 AM, Nyall Dawson wrote:
> > In general, I'd propose that we consider introducing (in the official
> > statutes) a limit of one-voting-member-per-organisation. This would
> > bring the community voting membership into line with the user group
> > membership, where user groups have one single voting member who
> > represents the group's view as a single vote. This would also limit
> > the potential for (god forbid) a "hostile takeover" situation, where a
> > coalition of organisations (commercial or user group) could dominate
> > voting. (I think it would be wise to apply the same one-member-per-org
> > limit to PSC/board membership too!).
>
> A very good discussion.
>
> How would a one-member-per organisation rule work in reality?
>
> If someone is a very active and respected member of the community with
> all the skills required to judge and discuss a QEP (or other motion) and
> has voting rights. And then gets employed by a company which already has
> someone with voting rights, will his voting rights be withdrawn? I would
> expect that this will have an effect on his choice of employer and could
> impact his engagement within community processes.
>
> Also, how would we deal with loosely coupled groups of developers which
> are legally not an organisation/company but still share business,
> communication and opinions?
>


Thank you Matthias for raising the question, we (QCooperative) are
exactly in that situation: we are a informal group where everyone has
his own independent company but we share a few clients and projects,
we also cooperate with other QGIS-focused companies that are not part
of QCooperative.

I totally understand the motivation behind the proposal
1-vote-per-company (a little bit less if it's 1-vote-per-org but it
will still get my +1 because it's hard to draw the line between a
company and an organization), it will certainly put the life of
QCooperative in serious danger but I can see the bigger danger if a
real Evil.corp business oriented company would have had 7 votes and 5
grant proposal (joint or not).

On the other hand, I prefer think that our voters can be trusted and
think that everyone will vote following their conscience, to prevent
voters feeling "forced" I think that vote secrecy is the key.

Because I can imagine that if you are a company employee with voting
rights you would feel gently pushed (or less gently depending on your
boss and your company finances) to vote for your desk-mate proposal or
more generally to a proposal coming from your company.

Secret vote will ensure that this kind of pressure has no leverage.

Of course secret vote is completely independent from the
1-vote-per-org proposal, it could be enough to mitigate the risk of
company-induced bias or not, I actually don't know.

About Even proposal to have a larger voters base, I think it can
certainly be the cure against company-induced bias, but on the other
hand I don't really see how a larger electorate would be possibly be
well informed to vote on technical grant proposals about refactorings
and CI or python-bindings. I think there are only a few people that
can fully understand these grant proposals and most of them are in the
pool that 1-vote-per-org would decimate.

So, I would definitely welcome a larger electorate for general
questions (grant proposals for new features for example) but I don't
think they would help in this particular case.

Just my 2 neurons :)

-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
QCooperative:  www.qcooperative.net
ItOpen:   www.itopen.it