Reply inline: On Mon, January 10, 2011 01:15, Reed Wade wrote: [...]
And we could even set the bar pretty high for acceptance (? 80% approval).
I would like to think that we might obtain more than 90% approval for a particular option with some procedure for voting to consensus. However, I worry that even 80% could be too high to be an appropriate measure of consensus in a diverse electorate. Our experience with community wide ballots is very small and we should be very hopeful that the experience will improve over time as long as we do not set ourselves up for disappointment with expectations uninformed by sufficient experience. An especially high degree of favour for any particular option may be unlikely in such a diverse electorate as the Koha community at large. The issue of copyright license upgrade is to be put to the Koha community at large directly. Free software and the copyright licenses which support it are for software user freedom. Programmers tend to have some familiarity with the copyright licenses under which they contribute code or under which they would like to contribute code. Programmers working on the same project may be liable to share some common ideas about the choice of copyright license. Most of the Koha community at large consists of non-programmers with more diverse backgrounds. Many librarians are involved with copyright in a very different manner to the authorship contribution of programmers. Many librarians whom I have met are afraid of copyright while I have met few programmers afraid of copyright. Discussion and summaries of options need to help better inform everyone. The possibility of a division of the electorate in the wide Koha community is one reason why voting to consensus is a good idea. Having some minimum number of votes for the election result to be meaningful seems reasonable. We need merely be careful to not overestimate the number of people willing to participate in a ballot. Remember that the upgrade option has two possibilities allowing upgrade in general to have a strong consensus while there may be more division on the two upgrade possibilities. Making a special effort to discover whether some people may have an especially strong objection to a particular option is important for having a full discussion to obtain a better consensus.
This assumes my 'From what I can tells' are correct.
The proportional voting schemes seem to make more sense if we're looking for more than one outcome--which we aren't. -- unless we want to have a certain percentage of the code under one license or the another, that would be kind of cool (no, I'm joking here, don't do that).
Voting methods under discussion intended to maximise voter preferences especially when the electorate has to collectively adopt only one of a few possible options. Proportional representation in electoral systems is a different issue. [...] Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783