[Foundation-l] GFDL Q&A update and question

[Thomas Dalton]

> 1) Use the BoardVote software. It's secure, well-tested and
> well-understood. It's more burdensome to set up, the process for
> counting votes is quite rigorous (accurate but burdensome), and it may
> be overkill for this purpose. Votes are private.
> 2) Use a vote on Meta, like we did for e.g. the Wikinews and
> Wikiversity project launch votes. It's easy, but suffers from edit
> conflicts, and accurate vote counting is hard. Votes are public.

I'd vote for the BoardVote method - I'd say deciding what license
we're releasing things under is more important than electing board
members, so it doesn't seem like overkill to me.

Other decisions that need to be made regarding the vote are suffrage
and what level of majority is required.

Options for suffrage are many - you could say just 1 edit is required
on the grounds that anyone with a single edit is directly affected by
this proposal, so why shouldn't they be able to vote on it? You could
use the same suffrage requirements as board votes, since they are
commonly taken as a definition of community membership for the purpose
of votes. You could even weight votes by number of edits (one vote per
edit sounds like a bad idea to me but weighting by log(edits) may be
worth discussing).

As for majority required, I would say something more than 50% should
be necessary. We traditionally favour the status quo in pretty much
everything we do (except, for some reason, with the 3RR, I've never
understood that... but that's a discussion for another time and
place). Also, if we say 50% is all that's required and the result
comes out as 50.3% or something, you should know it's going to cause
massive drama (if we chose 60% and the results is 60.3% there is still
going to be plenty of drama, of course, but hopefully less). I'd go
with a requirement of 60%, but that's really just a number plucked out
of thin air, I welcome suggestions from people with actual reasons!