Discussion on Addressing Voting Issues and Proposed Update to Committer Rules

[Hauke Mehrtens]

On 5/4/25 17:37, Ted Hess wrote:
> 
> 
> 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.

We already have a voting history page, see:
https://openwrt.org/voting/start


>>> 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.

This is an old rule, it is in the list since the beginning.
We want to use more cloud services and do not want to maintain physical 
servers was the background.

> 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 
> ($$).

Hauke