Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi Hauke,

On 03-05-25, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
> 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.

Thanks for the proposal.  It is a good compromise because the current rule
can feel like an exclusion, which is probably why it isn't used in practice.

However, I think it hides two larger issues:

1) a technical voting issue: "simple majority" in the rules is ambiguous.

Simple majority usually means "more 'yes' than 'no' among the people who voted".
What we do in practice is called "absolute majority": counting "yes" votes
and having to reach 50% of all members with voting rights.

When the size of the group grows, it is inevitable that we get lower vote
participation, and absolute majority is hard to reach.

We could switch to a simple majority vote with quorum.  It would look like this:

- more "yes" than "no"
- AND at least Q "yes", where Q is the quorum as a function of the voting population N

Debian seems to use Q = 3/2 * sqrt(N).  With 42 total voters, it yields a quorum of 10.

In a local association, we use Q = sqrt(3*N).  With 42 total voters, it yields a quorum of 12.

Of course, this quorum would only apply to simple decisions.  Decisions
with more impact should have a higher quorum (1/2 = absolute majority, or
even 2/3 like our current rule 11 for updating the rules).


2) a social issue: in practice, "contributors" is a larger group than
   "committers" and we may want to extend voting rights for all
   contributors.

For example, it's been years since I haven't committed anything, so I
would be totally fine to lose commit access.  But I'm still involved in
other areas (infrastructure, buildbot, wiki admin) and I would still like
to participate in decisions.

This is more a long-term discussion, and is maybe less of a priority than
the current situation with blocked votes.

Baptiste
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openwrt.org/pipermail/openwrt-adm/attachments/20250504/7cd0de1e/attachment.sig>