Not very sure about it. And how do we announce the new commiter that he has been voted? Are we still making the announcement public? The feeling of being voted is very nice, you get a picture of the people that appreciate what you do. Letting this go would be a pitty and if we are not removing this part then it means we are gonna duplicate the vote. Also the voting process is usually initiated by an existing commiter. IMO the initiator is responsible to assure he is proposing someone who will be accepted without problems. Until now people that didn't agreed with something (or didn't had enough information about the topic) they didn't vote. Because our number is increasing I propose to increase the needed votes to pass the proposal from 3 to 5+, or why not even half+1 in important cases, like this one. IMO, we either do everything public or not. So doing a private list just for this purpose is not sufficient IMO and is also a not very encountered case. Thanks, Caty On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 16:16, Vincent Massol <vincent(a)massol.net> wrote:

Hi Guillaume, Your arguments are very valid and I've considered them a lot before sending my vote. Actually to be perfectly honest, I've been on the fence on this question for several years now. However I've been slightly more in favor of the private list idea lately (I think due to the fact that I've proposed quite a few committers. It's probably harder to understand if you haven't done so). See below for more details. On Oct 10, 2011, at 4:04 PM, Guillaume Lerouge wrote: Actually this questions arises relatively frequently in open source communities (be it apache or elsewhere) and I've seen it raised several times in my 12-13 years of open source. The other reason you haven't experienced may be because you've not proposed committers yet. You haven't had to individually contact every one to make sure the vote will get accepted, convince people offline that it's a good choice, etc. Apparently you call this transparency… :) I don't. How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions on new members or even with -1? Answer: none How many times have you seen people voting with restrictions or even -1 or topics other than member voting? Answer: frequently Why? Because people are respectful and tend to shy away from telling someone in their face that they just sucks, or that they're too junior even with 15 years of experience… ;) My proposal is just to make voting a new member a real voting process. Actually you're forgetting one part which is one issue IMO. Let me give you an example. Imagine that I've seen that XXX has a good level of understanding of the xwiki platform and that he's submitted several patches in the past and I think he would be a good addition to the committers to the xwiki project. Right now I have 2 choices: * Send a VOTE email on the devs list. Two possibilities: ** he's accepted. Now I need to ask him if he's interested. If not, then the vote was for nothing ** he's not accepted. Now XXX sees this. Maybe someone said that he needs to provides more patches before he can be accepted or that his patches have some issues, etc. On one hand it's good since he now knows what he should improve, OTOH depending on how well-phrased or not the negative answers were, he'll feel let down and make simply stop participating to the project completely * Ask the potential committer if he'd be willing to become a committer (with all the committer duties - see committership on dev.xwiki.org). ** if he says yes and he's not accepted that sucks since you had increased his expectations and he's going to feel he's been let down or that his work is not appreciated, etc ** if he says no, then no issues. No vote is started. However others don't know about it. The solution I'm proposing is to send a mail on the committers@ list. If he's voted ok then we can contact him and ask him if he's interested in becoming a committer. If he's voted down no harm is done. Now I've always hesitated on this topic since I've seen arguments on both sides of the fence. I also agree that ideally it would be best done in the open if it could work but it doesn't IMO because of the way human relations work. People don't tell other people what they think of them in front of their face. Here's what Karl Fogel says in his book: "Producing open source software: how to run a successful free software project": http://producingoss.com/en/consensus-democracy.html " […] The voting system itself should be used to choose new committers, both full and partial. But here is one of the rare instances where secrecy is appropriate. You can't have votes about potential committers posted to a public mailing list, because the candidate's feelings (and reputation) could be hurt. Instead, the usual way is that an existing committer posts to a private mailing list consisting only of the other committers, proposing that someone be granted commit access. The other committers speak their minds freely, knowing the discussion is private. Often there will be no disagreement, and therefore no vote necessary. After waiting a few days to make sure every committer has had a chance to respond, the proposer mails the candidate and offers him commit access. If there is disagreement, discussion ensues as for any other question, possibly resulting in a vote. For this process to be open and frank, the mere fact that the discussion is taking place at all should be secret. If the person under consideration knew it was going on, and then were never offered commit access, he could conclude that he had lost the vote, and would likely feel hurt. Of course, if someone explicitly asks for commit access, then there is no choice but to consider the proposal and explicitly accept or reject him. If the latter, then it should be done as politely as possible, with a clear explanation: "We liked your patches, but haven't seen enough of them yet," or "We appreciate all your patches, but they required considerable adjustments before they could be applied, so we don't feel comfortable giving you commit access yet. We hope that this will change over time, though." Remember, what you're saying could come as a blow, depending on the person's level of confidence. Try to see it from their point of view as you write the mail. […] " The goal is not to decide to put other VOTEs on this private list. Only for committer voting. Thanks -Vincent

Hi Caty, On Oct 10, 2011, at 3:51 PM, Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) wrote: Yes, we have http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/HallOfFame anyway. It's public information. You're actually proving my point :) If voting is about giving +1 it's useless. That's not the point of voting and makes voting a joke IMO. You want to bet how you'd have felt if one of use had given a -1 to your VOTE as a committer? :) That's funny because it's the opposite of voting. What's the point of voting if you know the result already? The point of voting is to get the feedback from people. You're right though that right now it's a pain. When I propose someone I effectively have to contact a lot of committers manually by pinging them directly on skype or by mail to ask them how they'd felt if I started a vote mail for such person. The only reason I do this is because I know that a negative vote will be very negative for that person and I don't want that to happen. If the VOTE mail was on a private list, I would definitely not do this. Whenever I'd think that someone is good, I'd propose the VOTE and people who've interacted with the person would tell me what they really think. That's even worse! We want to know what people who don't agree think. They usually have very valid points. Ok that's another proposal but it's not related to this IMO. VOTing is not about giving +1. It's about +1, 0 and -1. I disagree. BTW this not new, we already have 2 private lists so the everything public or not argument doesn't stand ;) What you're effectively proposing is to stop voting for new members (since giving +1 for sure or not voting is the exact same). You're negating the fact that our vote system is not a proportional system (it's not a majority-based system). We have vetoes. We could indeed decide to change our vote rules for new members but it's bad since in your system people who don't agree will just shut up and you'll never know that the person shouldn't have become a contributor for such and such reason. I personally wouldn't change to change our vote rules for this. Thanks -Vincent

Hi Alex, On Oct 10, 2011, at 8:55 PM, Alex Busenius wrote: The proposal/vote is only about voting about committers on a private list. ATM I don't see any other vote topics that would justify being done privately. Sure, we're not changing this. What's the point of a "fake" vote if f it's been discussed before? If we discuss it privately and one of us is against it, we're not going to propose it so if we propose a vote publicly it means we all agree so what's the point of sending a vote? I don't see any interest in saying something like: "this person has been voted in as a committer, please provide your feedback within 48 hours if you think it's a bad idea!" Or: "committers have agreed not to vote this person as a committer, please provide arguments if you think committers should revise their judgements!" Thanks -Vincent

On Oct 10, 2011, at 11:08 PM, Alex Busenius wrote: Actually the latest stats on this is 64% of *active* XWiki Core committers are from XWiki SAS. See http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Drafts/Committers If Andreas is voted in, that'll make it 61% :) I like this trend, it's great. Thanks -Vincent

Hi, after thinking about it (and an IRL discussion with Vincent) here's my updated point of view on this: - Have a private mailing list for committers - If a committer feels that it's time for a contributor to become a committer, he suggests her on the private mailing list - Discussion on the private list ensues, committers decide whether the contributor is ready or not - If the contributor is not deemed ready, the process stops - If the contributor is deemed ready, the proposer talks to her privately and asks her whether she would be interested in becoming a committer - If she's not interested, the process stops - If she's interested, a public vote is launched on the devs mailing list This way the vote is still public and non-committers can voice their feedback, but there is a central location for the initial discussion (instead of the proposer having to go and talk to every committer privately on Skype, IRC and the like). We also keep the benefits of people standing publicly by their votes. WDYT? Guillaume On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 4:18 AM, Jerome Velociter <jerome(a)winesquare.net>wrote;wrote:

+1 too, Thanks, Marius On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 1:18 PM, Denis Gervalle <dgl(a)softec.lu> wrote:

Let's say I'm ok with the list - but not very happy about the secrecy trend. Thanks, Caty On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 13:34, Thomas Mortagne <thomas.mortagne(a)xwiki.com>wrote;wrote: