Re: Working group voting procedures in Process 2018

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017 18:49:14 +0200, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>  
wrote:

> I'm curious about the rationale behind one of the changes within
> #24, which covers voting *in working groups* (which is described in
> both the new and old process as a rare procedure that should only be
> used when consensus cannot be reached).
>
> In the current process, votes in a working group MUST be taken
> per-organization (or group of related members).  In the revised
> process, the default voting process (which can be overridden by
> charters) is that votes in a working group default to one vote per
> participant.
>
> This change seems to introduce the risk that, if a working group is
> facing issues contentious enough to lead to a vote, it allows
> organizations to add new members to the group in order to change the
> results.  This seems undesirable to me.

 From my perspective it is true that some organisation might try to fill  
the group to win a vote. In the unlikely event that an important issue  
really got determined this way and left people unhappy at the outcome, I  
would expect a formal objection. I expect part of the director's analysis  
of such an objection to include looking at any such attempt at "distorting  
the outcome" with about as much contempt as the particular case merits.

Voting is a suboptimal approach for most important decisions anyway. It is  
potentially useful to stop a bikeshed discussion (not because it gets a  
good answer, but because there isn't one apparent and it stops the time  
being sucked into different ways to make a bad decision...).

An alternative perspective is the old HTML Working Group, which had far  
more invited experts - each given one vote - than organisational members  
who were thus a small minority in any official vote. While I hope that was  
an historic anomaly, in a group where one large organisation has 4 times  
as many people as anyone else doing 75% of the work, while I suspect there  
will be other problems it seems reasonable to let them have more than 1  
vote, in the broken case that this is the only way forward on an issue.

So yes, there is a power shift in the "default" model. Between Arrow's  
theorem, a sense that very many questions are badly put to vote in my  
experience, and the sense that this is already a case that should have  
been avoided, I'm not terribly concerned at what the default looks like  
because I think it represents an attempt to save discussion on an issue  
rather than a soundly justifiable basis for claiming the answer is *right*.

cheers

Chaals

> (I'm coming to this from the perspective of a member of the CSS
> working group, which officially has 19 participants from Google, 11
> from Apple, 11 from Microsoft, 8 from Mozilla, 6 from Vivliostyle, 5
> from Adobe, 5 from BPS, etc., but has also never held a vote.  But
> I'm under the impression that there have been a small number of
> working groups where voting was used a good bit.)
>
> -David
>
> On Wednesday 2017-09-27 20:36 -0400, Jeff Jaffe wrote:
>> Dear AC representative, WG Chair, or member of the public,
>>
>> The W3C Advisory Board is forwarding a proposed Process 2018 draft [1]  
>> to the Advisory Committee for consideration and comment. The plan is  
>> that, based on the received comments, a revised draft will be sent to  
>> the Advisory Committee for formal Review prior to the November TPAC  
>> meeting and that there will be time for questions and comments on the  
>> proposed Review document at the TPAC meeting.
>>
>> [1]https://w3c.github.io/w3process/
>>
>> The major changes in this document and their rationale, with links to  
>> the current process and a diff from it, are provided in a backgrounder  
>> [2].
>> [2]https://www.w3.org/wiki/Process2018
>>
>> We call special attention to issue #5 - designed to increase agility  
>> for errata management moving us closer to a living standard model and  
>> issue #52 which updates participation and election rules for the TAG.
>>
>> Please send comments as soon as possible (to facilitate response  
>> preparation) and prior to October 26th (a 4 week comment period).   
>> Specific comments on the text are best filed as Github issues or even  
>> pull requests at the Process CG github  
>> site<https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues>.
>>
>> More general discussion and comments should be sent  
>> topublic-w3process@w3.org  (Mailing list archive, publicly available)  
>> or toprocess-issues@w3.org  (Member-only archive).  You may discuss  
>> your comments on any other list, such asw3c-ac-forum@w3.org, as long as  
>> you send the comments to one of the W3process lists above and copy that  
>> list in the discussion.
>>
>> Jeff Jaffe, Chair, W3C Advisory Board
>> Charles McCathie Nevile, Editor, W3C Process Document
>> David Singer, Chair, W3C Process Document Task Force
>>
>


-- 
Chaals is Charles McCathie Nevile
find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Monday, 23 October 2017 19:53:35 UTC