I was going to leave a comment on Ed Merks blog entry on "One Committer, One Vote?", but I found I filled up the space. That probably means I should do it in my own blog.
For those who haven't read Ed's blog, he reminds us of the Eclipse voting rule that all committers voting in the board elections get their votes lumped together with others working for the same organization. One organization, one vote. And yeah, if you work at IBM like I did when I learned about this, it leaves you feeling pretty insignificant in these things since you only get such a small fraction of one vote.
But I like this rule. I think it does a great job at promoting diversity. When the Eclipse Foundation was started the board went through a huge effort of making sure that Eclipse was seen as independent from its creator, IBM. To do that, they really needed, and still do need, to ensure as many organizations have a voice on the board as feasible. And this rule helps that by giving people outside IBM more of a chance of winning a board seat.
Now, it doesn't shut out people working for large organizations. The other good thing it does is encourage committers working for those organizations to reach out to the greater Eclipse community and not stay hidden behind the corporate walls. And I look at the IBMers running for the board this year and I can say they do just that. So even with this rule, I'm not sure I have much more of a chance of winning than they do. And that's good for Eclipse all round.
Cool! A point of disagreement!! Now I can slam you for your idiotic opinion. Just kidding. There are of course always two or more reasonable sides to every issue.
ReplyDeleteThat said. I strongly disagree. I would argue that promoting diversity needs to happen directly by promoting the diversity of the committer population itself, not by exploiting rules where some committers have 200 times more voting influence over who represents them than others. A diverse committer base will be more than capable of fielding a diverse slate of candidates and choosing the most appropriate from among those.
So far, the current rule has done absolutely nothing to promote committer diversity and in fact has not even helped produce diversity in the committer representation on the board last year. This year promises to be different, so that's really exciting to me.
I certainly don't consider any of the candidates to be at a particular advantage or disadvantage because of the rules, I just consider it unfair to the voting committers themselves and I hold fairness to be one of life highest principles.
I guess if we get to the point where 200 committers in one organizations isn't an order of magnitude if not more than any other organization, then I would agree with you.
ReplyDeleteBut if one committer had one vote, we'd be debating why IBM gets 1/5 of the vote for committer reps, where most organizations get 1/50'th.
The point is that IBM doesn't get one 1/5 of the vote. The committers each get to vote (if not a vote) and we vote as individuals choosing who will best represent us committers at the board.
ReplyDeleteAs I said in the response to David on my blog, the organizations themselves are already represented directly by the strategic members and by the elected add-in providers, so there is more than enough organizational bias already.
I certainly will not base my vote on whether the candidate is blue. I'm not even sure how to decide which way to vote, but it matters little in any case. I think experience counts for a lot, but I'd like to see some new faces too.
I'm confident that the committer population, those few who actually vote, will choose wisely and without organizational bias...
It's cool that we're actually debating an issue though, I must say! I hope you aren't advocating apple pie with ice cream or we'll need another round of blog counter blog!
I just don't hope we have an "Super Committers" that can vote anyway they choose. :)
ReplyDeleteSeriously though. No matter which way you do it, somebody is going to feel slighted. Either the smaller groups, like the individual committers are going to feel slighted, or the committers that work for the big companies are going to feel slighted because their vote is proportional to the rest of the vote.
I guess we could come up with a proportional delgate system based on the size of the company...then have a big debate once we reach EclipseCon. Imagine the lobbying going on. :)