DMB nominations, size and quorum

[Robie Basak]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 01:31:34PM -0700, Brian Murray wrote:
> If I'm understanding this correctly right now we have 7 people in the
> DMB and our new quorum would be 3, with that it is possible that
> somebody could become an Ubuntu Core Developer with only 2 votes and
> with 4 people not voicing an opinion at all?

Correct - this is what I'm proposing.

> with 4 people not voicing an opinion at all? Presumably the members were
> added to the board because other Ubuntu developers value their opinion
> but with the new system we wouldn't be taking them into account.  I'm
> not sure how I feel about that.

I understand how this causes you concern, and I agree in principle with
what you're saying.

With my proposal, I'm putting the need to make progress ahead of this
concern. If Ubuntu developers are unhappy about this, they should vote
for DMB members who are more likely to attend.

> That being said if we go down this route I wonder if we shouldn't shoot
> for a unanimous vote of the 3 people present, for applications only, and
> if it isn't then take it to the mailing.

If everyone can agree on this, I'd be happy to accept this as a
compromise. I think the common case is that we're unanimous, so this
variation would help, except in cases where only one or two members
attend a meeting, which IIRC is rarer.

Let me try to re-state this to make sure there is no confusion. This
alternate proposal would be this addition to the existing rules:

    An IRC meeting can proceed in considering applications without
    quorum. If such a non-quorate meeting votes on an application and
    the outcome is unanimous and with at least three +1s, then the
    application shall succeed as if the meeting had quorum.

Assuming we're continuing to define quorum as (n/2) rounded up, do you
intend the 3 as a constant or as some function on n? Or would you want
to re-evaluate this amendment if the DMB size changes?

On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 11:01:08AM -0400, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre wrote:
> I concur, and for that reason I disagree with the proposal. It could
> already be argued that the decisions are made arbitrarily when only a
> fraction of the DMB ever shows up to the meetings. I'd be in favour of
> reducing the number of people on the board (and strive to do better at
> making it to the meetings), but not making quorum easier to achieve. We're
> many people on the board precisely so we can reach that quorum of 4; and
> that allows us to remove one or two people from the total number of people
> on the board, if all of them do show up.

My understanding is that quorum is defined as (n/2) rounded up, rather
than by being fixed at 4 with more DMB members on the board to help us
achieve it. But if you're proposing to change the size of the board
while leaving quorum fixed at 4, then I'm OK with that in principle.
I think we'd need to define rules about how we handle a split vote, as
it would introduce some edge cases which do not exist today.

>                                          Being absent once in a while is
> fine, never showing up questions your will be sit on the board.

I'd prefer to try and address issues (such as meeting timing) that are
stopping board members attending first.

> > That being said if we go down this route I wonder if we shouldn't shoot
> > for a unanimous vote of the 3 people present, for applications only, and
> > if it isn't then take it to the mailing.
> >
> 
> I know it's hard to get people involved in the DMB in the first place, but
> we should already be shooting for unanimous voting to add a new developer.
> When the board isn't unanimous, it brings into question whether the
> prospective developer is involved in the community in general, or in the
> quality of the contributions (obviously, depending on the actual request).
> In other words, someone wanting to get core-dev should be an easy,
> unanimous vote most of the time.

I agree in general with this statement, but I'm unclear as to what
you're proposing. Are you saing that we should change the rules so that
core dev applications are only approved if the vote is unanimous?

What's your position on Brian's suggestion?

Robie
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