Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules

[Ted Hess]

On 5/3/2025 5:40:01 PM, "Hauke Mehrtens" <hauke at hauke-m.de> wrote:

>Hi Ted,
>
>On 5/3/25 22:41, Ted Hess wrote:
>>Hi all -
>>
>>Added my response to the bottom for those who prefer it that way ;)
>>
>>On 5/3/2025 12:45:48 PM, "Hauke Mehrtens" <hauke at hauke-m.de> wrote:
>>
>......
>>
>>
>>I understand your frustration over the lack of voting participation. It is certainly an indication that the number of "committers" has become large with too many non-participants on questions of membership and organization. I essentially agree with your proposal but will reserve buy-in until we see the actual or proposed list of active and inactive members. I hope we do not find ourselves in a "catch-22" situation where we cannot get enough participants to adopt this proposal even.
>
>
>All current committers should transfer into the active committers section in the beginning. In the next step I will probably ask some people who haven't committed anything or send a mail to the public lists in the last 6 months if they want to move into the inactive category.
>
>The proposed rules do not allow to force someone into the inactive committers list. Even when you are in this list, you can just move back again to active committers.
I know this wasn't a call for a vote - but yes, let's adopt the change 
in rules regarding voter registration and apply the "patch". As part of 
the next steps - we could possibly start a "voting history" page 
tracking questions and respondents (not actual votes - just 
participation and summary results). This should make it easy to 
implement your plan.

>>The infrastructure issues currently existing are not in anyway helped by this rules proposal and should be a separate discussion among those who actually want to participate in its management. Forum and Wiki moderation is not currently or even in the past handled by "committers" - rather, just a handful of dedicated, helplful users.
>
>Is this about changing committers into members or an other part of the proposal?
>Do you think this proposal increases the infrastructure problems?

I don't fully understand the following;

 >> Project infrastructure should be outsourced FOSS community operated 
services whenever possible in order to allow project members to focus on 
actual development efforts.

If by infrastructure we actually mean: computes, storage and bandwidth, 
then I agree 100%. On the other hand... Operations, management and 
moderation should be done by both project "committers/members" and 
dedicated volunteers. I have no objections to having our public 
platforms (forum and wiki) handled by non-committers. This has been true 
up to now and it has worked out rather well. Our problems currently are 
lack of volunteers.

The other end of the infrastructure, which I believe gets a lot of 
attention from developers and others, is the repositories, build and 
distribution systems. I find the Firmware Selector and custom builder 
coupled with it a really nice addition to the project. Overall, from 
what I can tell here, we share the same problems in all areas regarding 
bots, crawlers, scrapers and other creatures trying to diminish our 
ability to service users. To that end, we do need to look at what we can 
do and still maintain our (somewhat) independence from non-FOSS 
solutions -- not all that easy as we gain popularity and need to scale 
($$).