Re: loomio

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Germán Póo-Caamaño <gpoo gnome org> wrote:

On Sun, 2013-04-14 at 20:53 -0400, Hashem Nasarat wrote:
> > [...]

> Sriram, while I agree many problems would be alleviated with more
> volunteer time, I've witnessed multiple instances in the past 6 months
> where decisions were not made democratically, despite a clear lack of
> consensus. Most recently, there were a great deal of changes to the
> gnome-shell "All Applications" view very late in the 3.8 schedule, well
> after code freeze, and despite visible disagreement. Loomio seems to
> offer an intuitive way of seeing how controversial a change is.

"If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a
better horse" -- Henry Ford [1]

Software development is not a democracy.  Decisions are taken by people
who actually develop the software.  Comments might or might not be
welcomed depending of several factors (politeness, pertinence,
reputation, data, etc.).

 Germán is right.  In free software land, the module maintainer is the ultimate dictator of what goes into the code base.  So the decision falls upon the maintainer and a trusted cohort or two.   In which case, decisions are fairly easy to come to and you don't really need decision software.

Marketing and others non-coding teams tends to require more consensus mostly because sometimes money and tangible resources are involved so decisions are done jointly.  That's where such things would be interesting.

So for instance, your suggestion of decision software might quite well for the Board when trying to document consensus, but it doesn't map well to the technical culture of free software.

sri