[llvm-foundation] Voting

[Renato Golin via llvm-foundation]

On 29 June 2016 at 17:02, Alex Bradbury <asb at asbradbury.org> wrote:
> This proposal of course assumes that the LLVM community is to be run
> as a direct democracy.

I don't think it does. At least, that wasn't what I was proposing at all.

My point was simply to reach consensus *first*, as usual, then vote
*only* on the most controversial / high impact decisions to cristalize
the consensus into a number. Good examples are version control, code
of conduct, license, etc.

Voting without (or to reach) consensus is a grenade to the foot.


> 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?

This is what we have done as far as I can remember, and is my
interpretation of what we have evolved into.

>From previous posts in this list, the foundation doesn't want to be a
driving force, but a supporting force, and I very much support this
view. We have had the model of consensus for a long time and it has
worked very well so far. In that case, the foundation can only make it
better.

I think Chris' words reflect that position well:

"Most things can be done by the community, the foundation should only
step in when there is no ability (e.g. legal issues) or apparent will
(e.g. the website overhaul) to do it."


> Communities such as
> FreeBSD, Debian, and others obviously have rather more involved and
> fully defined decision procedures.

I am confident that this will not work for LLVM.

We grew into a group of mostly agreeable and respectable people, and
politics will only drive us away from each other and tear the
community appart (see Britain).

The day that we *need* politics, the community will be long dead. The
GitHub, code of conduct and license threads are great examples of how
we can persevere against the odds and come up better as a group.

We may not agree with everything, and take a long time to change
things, but we're always moving towards what the collective believes
is better (whatever that means).

Less haste, more speed.

cheers,
--renato