[llvm-foundation] Voting

[Alex Bradbury via llvm-foundation]

On 29 June 2016 at 16:22, Renato Golin via llvm-foundation
<llvm-foundation at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been thinking, how we're going to do the Git vote. But more
> importantly, it would be good to define some guidelines on how we vote
> for general issues. So far, we have used consensus as our driving
> force, but the number of developers, projects and companies depending
> on LLVM is growing a lot, and we're less often reaching consensus now
> than a few years ago.
>
> Sometimes, we reach consensus, but a few dissidents still can't see
> consensus, and having a vote would go a long way to show consensus has
> formed. In that sense, we should only vote *after* consensus was
> formed by considering *all* issues on the list.

This proposal of course assumes that the LLVM community is to be run
as a direct democracy. I don't want to distract from your detailed
proposal, but it seems the desired governance model needs to be
defined before delving in to the details of how to implement it. Or
has this discussion taken place somewhere? I'm specifically not
expressing a view one way or the other. I had assumed the current
set-up was some combination of BDFL and decisions being taken by
Foundation board members, but I don't recall this being explicitly
defined - though it would be good if it was. Communities such as
FreeBSD, Debian, and others obviously have rather more involved and
fully defined decision procedures.

To get an indicative view from the LLVM developer community, perhaps
it would be good enough to set up a Google form inviting people to
give their name, email, whether they have the commit bit, and their
'vote'. The resulting spreadsheet can then be easily analysed. I don't
think there's a way to have the email validated in Google forms (i.e.
send an email with a confirmation link), which would be be necessary
to protect against someone theoretically entering false information -
though in practice this may not be an issue.

Best,

Alex