Voting

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

Before the first batch of issues is voted on by the technical committee
(us), we'd better decide what the rules are.  Possibilities range from
the very cautious to the very quick.  On the cautious side, we could
leave an issue on the table until we've heard from everyone on the
committee and until we've either reached unanimity or it is clear that
we are not going to converge.  That could take a long time, especially
if someone goes on vacation or gets buried by other work for awhile.

On the quick side, I could toss out proposals with my recommendation and
say that the recommendation will become law unless someone on the
committee complains within a week, in which case we'll have an internal
discussion followed by a vote.  We'd be able to move fast that way, but
maybe too fast.

Let me propose an intermediate system:

When a proposal is officially submitted to the commitee (with a
recommendation), it will not become an official decision until (a) a
majority of the members of the committee (5 out of 8) have explicitly
voted in favor of it AND (b) one week has passed.  Furthermore, if
during the week anyone on the committee objects to the majority
decision, we will withhold any decision for a second week while the
person objecting tries to persuade others of his view.  After two weeks,
the majority rules unless the members of the majority agree to a allow
the decision to be delayed for further study and debate.  Obviously, if
we take the two-week option on two many things, we're either going to
take twice as long to decide all this or we'll have to consider issues
in larger batches.

All of this would be done via the Cl-Technical mailing list so that we
don't get randoms introducing lots of noise into the process.  However,
we may occasionally decide to take an issue back to the larger list in
order to sample community opinion on some issue that comes up and that
wasn't argued to death already.

Opinions?

-- Scott