Decision: vote details

The forgefriends manifesto currently reads:

An action impacting others is advertised in advance and carried out if there is a consensus (or a favorable vote if there is no consensus)

I propose it is changed to:

An action impacting others is advertised in advance and carried out if there is a consensus (or a favorable majority vote of the voters if there is no consensus)

If there is no objection within four weeks, the change will be made to the manifesto.

I think the change is necessary to unambiguously define how vote results must be counted before the first call for a vote happens. It defines:

  • The voting method to be a majority vote
  • The voting population to be whoever voted, i.e. the voters

I do not feel strongly about the voting method and maybe another one would be better. My inclination is to choose a simple one. If and when the votes become more frequent, this can be changed for a more sophisticated one.

I do not see how the voting population can be anything else but the people who cast a vote for a particular decision. If the forgefriends community had rules to determine membership, the voting population could be the members of the community. But it is horizontal and whoever feels like declaring themselves a member of the community can do so.

I do not think the manifesto should go into details explaining how the vote must be organized. Should it be using a given software? Who counts the votes? Are they anonymous? etc. This should be left to whoever organizes the vote. There are a zillion ways to organize a vote and it will likely be different every time. Since most decisions are expected to be made by consensus, votes should be rare and it re-thinking how to organize them won’t be too much of a burden.

There has been no objection in the past four weeks and the proposed change was applied to the manifesto