Remove the 72 hours limitation of votes

Development
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m opening a vote to change our rules for votes. @MichaelHamann recently brings to our attention that our committership rules stated that:

Votes are carried for 72 hours and the votes are tallied after this time is elapsed

But the thing is that some of us at least were not even aware about that rule (myself included) and were not using it at all. Personally I often open votes for at least one week, you can just check my open votes on this forum. @MichaelHamann did follow the rule by the book and closed recently a vote because of it.

Frankly I don’t think that limitation is useful or really wanted. My proposal is to replace this sentence by:
“Votes are opened with a defined closing date”. Any date is ok for me, as sometimes we need very fast vote, and sometimes we need long vote or don’t really care how much time it will take. Now we do need a date for knowing when the vote is closing.

I’m opening this vote for 3 days so until thursday the 5th of october :slight_smile:

Here’s my +1.

Allow using more than 72 hours for votes
#2

+1 thanks

#3

+1

#4

Context: At the time we had mimicked our vote process on the apache one.

-1 to remove it but +1 to allow a VOTE to change that default time if need be (but only if it’s greater than 72 hours).

Rationale:

  • I believe we always need a deadline even when it’s forgotten to be defined in the VOTE itself (and IMO in the majority of cases we don’t need to define it specifically as the default would be just fine).
  • The reason for 72 hours at minimum is because not everyone is paid to work on XWiki full time and several community members do it in the free time and not all the time. Thus we need to leave enough time for them to participate (hence the 72 hours). In addition we usually use proposals and not votes so when we use VOTEs it’s because the topic is very important and thus we need to leave enough time for voters (and why we should never go less than 72 hours).
  • The reason to keep the 72 hours by default is that we also don’t want votes to take too long and be able to progress relatively fast. If someone opens a vote for 1 year, it doesn’t make much sense and we’ll all have forgotten the arguments about it (yeah I’m taking an extreme case to make the point).

BTW Apache nowadays say:

Voting periods should generally run for at least 72 hours to provide an opportunity for all concerned persons to participate, regardless of their geographic location.

See Apache Voting Process for the full current practices @ apache. It’s interesting to notice that they have different types of votes with different mechanisms. I think we kind of did something similar with the move towards proposals instead of votes.

Thanks

#5

Same as Vincent, I think it’s useful to have a default deadline. It’s a bit of a pain to have to specify the deadline each time you open a vote. But I aggree sometimes you may need a longer period to get an agreement, in which case it should be specified.

#6

So to be clear, right now the rule is not specifying a default time, it’s specifying that the time is always of 72 hours and not more.
So do you propose that we vote to have another time, which will need to be always reached, or do you propose that we vote for allowing to decide when opening the vote how much time it should last, and to have by default 72 hours to vote?

#7

So if your intepretation of Vincent’s proposal is correct, I’m also fine with that (having a default time to 72 hours and allowing to have more time when opening the vote).

The only question remaining for me is: do we want to keep a minimum of 72 hours or not? I remember that we had at least one case in the past when we needed a very fast vote in 48 hours for some important stuff before a release (I probably can find it back in this forum).

#8

I’d be against going lower than 72 hours for a VOTE. If the topic is important, then 72 hours is really the minimum. If it’s not so important then a VOTE is not needed and a proposal is enough. And if that is not fast enough we still have the lazy consensus option that we use all the time too :wink:

#9

Yes: 72 hours of default time when not specified, not less than 72 hours and possibility to say that a given vote is for more than 72 hours).

Not correct, see:

Votes are carried for 72 hours and the votes are tallied after this time is elapsed

#10

Ah, I understood the sentence as “after 72 hours, the result of the vote is agreed on with all votes already performed”, but after reading it again (twice) I understand that the “new votes are accepted after the time is elapsed”, is that the meaning of that sentence?

Then we might want to just make it more clear.

#11

I don’t understand what’s not clear in that sentence. It means that you can vote until 72 hours have passed since the vote start, and then after the 72 hours have passed, a count/summary of the votes is done. You cannot vote after 72 hours. Thus, right now, the default time is always set and it’s always 72 hours.

#12

Ah but then it’s not default time, it’s the mandatory time. There’s no rule saying that this time can be specified in the vote itself
.

#13

It’s a default time because you don’t need to specify it in the vote threads, since… it’s the default :slight_smile:

Yes and that’s because you cannot do that at the moment (votes are not allowed to take longer than 72 hours).

#14

I’m closing this vote as there was a -1 from Vincent and we needed clarification. So I opened a new vote to have things clear: Allow using more than 72 hours for votes