[Foundation-l] Global rights proposal

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 1:31 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com> wrote:
> One project, one vote.
>
> That sounds great.

While some kind of positive discrimination for smaller-than-en.wp
projects is necessary, one project -- one vote seems as a very unfair
toward people from en.wp and other large projects.

> The local 'crats should be responsible for putting forward the view of
> their project in the meta "vote", and they should be allowed to do so
> in any language, but of course English would be preferred.

Yes, it is a good idea to give that responsibility to local bureaucrats.

> A fixed timeframe is probably necessary, however 70 days is _way_ too long.
>
> 7 days to discuss on the meta talk page and and formulate the
> proposal; 7 days for local projects to develop a response; 7 days for
> the responses to be collated onto meta.  21 days max.

Talking 7 days about one issue may be too short for a lot of the
projects. Also, there is no need for hurrying about global policies,
as well as it is possible to run at the same time two or three global
policies if it is really necessary.

> A steward should probably to responsible for flicking the switch to
> say that a proposal is live after the first seven days, and again a
> steward should probably be the one to flick the switch and decide the
> outcome.  They judgment should be trusted rather than requiring that
> the process is run by stopwatches.

It is better to have some kind of procedure: Proposer has to announce
short version of the proposal it at all projects with communities ("a
project with community" should be defined and listed) after the
initial discussion. From that point, proposer should do the jobs
described in the policy related to the global permissions (or in the
howto which describes the procedure of making a global policy). If a
proposer fails to fit to the timeline and the procedure, it is not so
hard to find a consensus that the proposal is dead.

> In reality, most projects will have started discussing a proposal long
> before the proposal page can even be created on meta (they are primed,
> and bursting with ideas, having heard about it on the grapevine) and
> most projects will continue to discuss it to death until the eleventh
> hour of the 21st day.  Projects that don't get motivated quickly
> probably don't care enough to be involved, or are unlikely to be
> affected.

Actually, no. From the experience of a couple of previous policies and
calls for discussion, contributors are informed about a policy
proposal only when the time for voting comes. So, "the policy about
making global policies" has to find a way how to deal with that.
Simply, it has to be slow; otherwise, it wouldn't function: when
contributors are not informed well about a policy proposal, they tend
to vote against. And even the majority is in favor of some policy, the
level of agreement about the new policy has to be very high (80%).

> By restricting the voting stage to only 'crats, the good folk who
> facilitate on meta will more readily be able to identify which
> projects haven't submitted a response, in order that they can reach
> out and attempt to solicit a response from those communities.

Hmm... Voting only by active admins (not bureaucrats): It may be a good idea.