[csw-maintainers] [POLICY] Policy-team

[Philip Brown]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 2:12 PM, Jonathan Craig <jcraig at opencsw.org> wrote:
>
> The easy answer is after 10 days a majority can force a vote,

but then you have to tally "votes" to see if "a majority" is asking
for a vote, before voting :)
I dont think that is very workable.

> It seems like your concern is over protecting the minority voice.

yup.

>  So,
> what are the minority rights? Do we have the equivalent of a
> filibuster?  Should the minority have the right to block progress?

I dont think that filibusters are a good thing.
On the flip side, I dont think that a majority just ignoring issues
raised by a minority group, because "hey we've got enough people to
just ignore them" is a good thing either.

IDEALLY, this sort of thing would be handled by a project secretary,
who would be fair and impartial to judge whether each side's concerns
are being properly heard and discussed, before the vote takes place.

Unfortunately, and putting this as respectfully as possible, I'm not
sure that our current secretary is a good example of impartiality when
it comes to listening to both sides.
So we may be better off with some other mechanism.

Also, we need to make sure that the writeup for a vote, is done
fairly. We've already been through a vote where the writeup was
unfairly biased towards one side, because only one person wrote it.
I think it's important that for "issue" type votes, a person from each
"side", gets to write their  respective side of the ballot writeup.