Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules

Sat May 3 09:45:48 PDT 2025

Hi,

As many of you are aware, we've been facing significant challenges with 
voting in the project for the past few years. A key issue is the large 
number of inactive committers, which has led to the failure of the last 
two votes. Although I've participated in several private email 
discussions and face-to-face conversations about this problem, I don't 
believe it's been formally raised on the openwrt-adm list yet.

The current rule regarding inactive committers is not functioning as 
intended:
 > Committers being unreachable for three months in a row shall get
 > their commit and voting rights revoked in order to retain the ability
 > to do majority votes among the remaining active committers.

Proposal for an Inactive Committer Category

I’d like to propose introducing a formal “inactive committer” category. 
The core idea is to provide a clearer distinction between active and 
inactive participants, as well as improve security by reducing the 
number of people with access to our repositories.

Here’s how the proposal would work:

  * Inactive Committers List:
     We would add a second list for "inactive committers" on the OpenWrt 
About page. This would help make it clear to both community members and 
outsiders who is actively contributing.

  * Commit Credentials for Inactive Committers:
     The commit credentials of inactive committers would be deactivated 
until they choose to return to active status. This also increases 
security, as it reduces the number of accounts with access to the 
repository.

  * Voluntary Transition Between Statuses:
     Any committer can voluntarily move themselves between the active 
and inactive categories at any time, without requiring a vote.

  * Requesting a Move to Inactive:
     Any active committer can request that another committer be moved to 
inactive status. The person being moved has 30 days to respond to the 
request. If they do not respond, or if they agree, they will be moved to 
inactive status.

Next Steps and Discussion

This email is not a formal vote; rather, I am starting a discussion on 
how we can address this issue and improve our voting process. Below are 
a few points I hope we can discuss:

  * Feedback on the Proposed Changes:
     If you have any concerns or suggestions about the proposed rule 
changes (outlined below), please feel free to share them. I would 
appreciate solid feedback on any unclear wording, as it’s crucial that 
we avoid ambiguity in these rules.

  * Alternative Proposals:
     If you have alternative ideas on how to address the issue of 
inactive committers, please bring them forward now. I’m open to 
suggestions, and the goal is to find a solution that works for the 
community as a whole.

  * Changes to Committer Terminology:
     I briefly considered changing the term "committers" to "members" in 
order to make it easier to extend voting rights to people who contribute 
in ways other than code. I decided to leave it as "committers" for now 
to reduce the scope, but if there’s enough support for this change, I 
can revisit it.

Once we’ve had a good discussion and addressed any concerns, we can 
proceed with a vote. I think it’s important that we ensure all affected 
members are personally pinged to participate in the vote when the time 
comes.

I am proposing the following rules update (see also attached patch):

---------------
The roles within the OpenWrt (former LEDE) project are: active 
committers, inactive committers, and non-committers. There is no core 
developer group or other specially privileged members.
All active committers have the right to vote and are invited to 
liberally exercise this voting right in order to keep a broad consensus 
on project matters.
Project matters, overall development directions etc. are decided by 
simple majority votes among all active committers. Votes may be held in 
different ways like simple yes/no decisions, majority decisions among 
multiple proposed choices etc.
Committers may voluntarily switch between active and inactive status at 
any time.
The commit credentials of inactive committers are revoked and will be 
restored upon their return to active status.
Any active committer may request that another committer be moved to 
inactive status. This request must be sent by email to the person 
concerned, with the openwrt-adm mailing list in CC. If the person either 
agrees or does not respond within 30 days, they will be moved to 
inactive status.
There shall be only full commit rights in any case, no partial access or 
otherwise restricted access to the repositories.
Frequent contributors may become committers after a simple majority 
agreement among existing active committers. Project members are free to 
suggest suitable people.
Any votes and decisions made will be made public on the project websites.
Project infrastructure should be outsourced FOSS community operated 
services whenever possible in order to allow project members to focus on 
actual development efforts.
Any infrastructure that cannot be outsourced and/or is operated by the 
project itself shall be administrable by at least three different people 
to reduce the likelyhood of the project getting locked out due to 
operators being unreachable. Responsible operators for the various 
services shall be documented publicly.
The project will not offer email accounts under its project domain for 
privacy and equality reasons.
Changes to these rules require a two third majority among the committers 
holding voting rights and shall be documented.
Be nice to each other.
------------

Hauke
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