I voted for the
"editorial"
changes to the Social Contract. At the time it seemed like the right thing
to do.
I considered writing a rant about the lack of supporting information for the
GR. There was no published rationale that I could find, nobody advocated
either side, as far as I could see, and there was not even a diff indicating
the changes. Well, I soon found out myself that a diff would have been mostly
useless, as the wording changes were fairly thorough. It did not help me
make my mind.
Of course, I could have read mail archives of the vote mailing list.
My past experience told me not to bother. It was likely that I could not
find the relevant pieces of information I sought for without investing too
much time to it.
I wrote the above about a hour ago and was interrupted by having to catch the
bus. Now I noticed that there was a
request
for discussion on devel-announce about a month ago. It is clear that I
could have participated in the discussion, but I had faith in all the sides
being represented in the discussion without my involvement, and I assumed that
rationales and advocacy would be present and easily locatable when the voting
time came. When the actual call for votes appeared, I no longer remembered
that mail. It seems I was not the only one.
I made my decision based on reading the proposal, comparing it to the current
wording and not noticing the bomb. Nobody pointed the bomb out to me, either.
I assumed that a GR marked "editorial" would really be editorial, not intended
to change the meaning of the document.
As
we have seen, this assumption was faulty.
What we should learn from this incident is, in my opinion, that all general
resolutions should be accompanied with an official rationale document
(similar to DPL election platforms) with rebuttals from people who oppose
the change. Campaigning should be more visible.
I do not agree with
Joey
Hess's assessment that GRs are not a good idea for Debian. I would not
have had (did not have) the time to participate in a discussion seeking a
consensus, and thus it cannot be assumed that all of the 200 or so developers
who voted would have participated.
The problem with respect to the low number of voters is in my opinion that
the issue being decided seemed to me (and thus probably many others)
uncompilcated and void of any disagreement. There was even no counterproposals! I would assume that many people
did not vote because they believed that it would pass anyway. All of our other
general resolutions have enjoyed more voters; I believe the reason is that they
were considered more controversial by many and hence many more felt the need
to make their voices heard.