Discuss mailing list

[Jacob Bachmeyer <jcb62281 AT gmail.com>]

Al Beano wrote:
> Voting starts: 2018-08-16 16:00 UTC
> Voting ends: 2018-08-23 16:00 UTC
>
> The quality of discourse on this list recently has been extremely 
> poor, and although I am loath to introduce yet another bureaucratic 
> vote, I think that a standard, agreed upon set of voting rules would 
> go some way towards improving things here.
>
> I started a discussion about this some weeks ago 
> (https://lists.opennicproject.org/sympa/arc/discuss/2018-07/msg00113.html) 
> and I am now bringing this to a vote.
>
> 1. Formal votes on proposals submitted to the mailing list will have 
> three possible responses: yes, no and spoiled ballot/abstention.
> 2. Responses which clearly contain "YES", "AYE" or words to that 
> effect will be considered "yes" votes.
> 3. Responses which clearly contain "NO", "NAY" or words to that effect 
> will be considered "no" votes.
> 4. All other responses will be considered abstentions from voting and 
> counted as such.
> 5. Motions will pass with a simple majority of all yes/no votes. 
> Abstentions do not affect the outcome in any way. They are informational.
> 6. In the event of a tie, the status quo will be preserved.
> 7. This proposal will govern all votes submitted after it passes.
>
> This proposal only governs *formal* votes - that is, votes which will 
> directly affect the way OpenNIC runs. If members want to use a 
> different method to gauge the membership's opinion, for example to 
> allow more than two outcomes in a vote, they are still able to do that 
> in any way they want. If they want to make a formal change to the 
> rules after that, they would have to run a vote in compliance with the 
> rules above.

Nay.

While I could support a more-structured voting process, these are overly 
strict and the concerns that others have raised over counting a 
deliberately invalid ballot the same as someone not submitting a ballot 
at all bother me.  I rather liked the idea of using IRV to select from a 
multiple-option proposal, but would suggest requiring an aye/nay 
ratification vote for the result of any multiple-option process.

-- Jacob