Re: Yes to Publicity! Not to Anonimit! Was: Re: GNOME Foundation Annual Elections - proposal

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2003 at 01:04:47PM -0700, Aleksey Sanin wrote:
> better" part. I am not so sure about that and I would like to make 
> descisions based on facts
> instead of plain cliches "anonimity is good!".

  You can't get facts about this. Well you could poke history
and notice that usually totalitary regimes used public votes as a way
to eradicate official contestation. As a result from an historical
viewpoint, anonymous voting is considered the normal rule of a
modern democracy. You can challenge that, either generally, or in
the specific case of GNOME.
  I still think that making that change is one of the last parts
of the general process of building the GNOME foundation as a democratic
entity following the usual democratic rules. The reasons why we 
initially decided to have public votes have disapeared, there is
no apparent risk of any entity taking over the process at this point,
and I think it is wise to now change that last not-very-democratic
point of our process.
  You have the right to raise objections, they are noted and archived.
But so far except you and Sergey Panov, most people seems to consider
this a good thing if we can make sure that voting can be authenticated
and that the result of the voting process can be checked collectively.
I think the algorithm as modified with Alan Cox suggestion provides 
those guarantees, and nobody challenge this at this point.
  At this point, and unless more dissent voices emerge or some kind
of explicit scenario provided proving a serious trouble with the
new voting process is shown, I think the board should ultimately
accept this plan, probably at the next meeting 23rd September. So
there is still ample time to discuss this but I think other people
who have strong feelings about this should express themselves in 
the meantime :-)

Daniel

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