Re: Working group voting procedures in Process 2018

In a consensus process, voting is what you have when you have to decide,
but consensus can't be found.
So I think we all agree that it's an emergency measure, and will
practically be done only in stressed situations.

Making up rules while stressed is bad. So clear, reasonable "default rules"
are needed.

Sociology: People who percieve a situation as a "win/lose" situation will
position themselves to win as best they can.
So if voting is going to happen, people *will* try to skew the voting rolls
- whether by changing "who votes", by trying to exclude certain
groups/people from voting ("you can't vote, you have a conflict of
interest"), or by making the vote particularly onerous to participate in
("you have to be on this telechat at 3AM to cast your vote").

It's obvious for both "one person one vote" and "one company one vote" how
to stack the vote - in one case, bring 100 of your closest friends to the
meeting; in the other case, tell every company and organization you work
with to join up and send a representative. Both have happened in standards
organizations we've worked with.

The difference is that stacking the vote by adding companies:
a) takes longer
b) costs more - with some of that being money that ends up in the W3C's
coffers
c) is harder to hide (because it takes longer).

If we have to have voting on issues that are important (and I think we have
to), I'd prefer the option that makes vote-stacking take longer and be more
expensive for the stacker.



On Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 3:51 AM, David Wood <david.wood@ephox.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> On 24 October 2017 at 05:52, Chaals McCathie Nevile <chaals@yandex.ru>
> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
>
> Chaals calls this scenario "unlikely". Is it really?
>
> It might be worth noting that I recently (in the last two years) attended
> a meeting where the CSS working group had a majority of voting members
> attending from a single organisation. A quick check of the membership of
> that group [1] yields:
>
> Google: 19 participants
> Microsoft: 11 participants
> Apple: 11 participants
> Mozilla: 8 participants
>
> Without making any attempt whatsoever to infer whether those numbers are a
> good idea (they might be for such a core WG), it is certainly an existence
> proof that WGs can end up with a small number of organisations dominating
> the active participation.
>
> Regards,
> Dave
>
> [1] https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members
>
>
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>