Request for Comments: Who can vote?

• Version: 0.1
• Date: 2011-11-09
• Author: Ferenc Kovacs tyra3l@gmail.com
• Status: Withdrawn
• First Published at: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/voting_who

The original voting RFC has left open some questions about who can vote, and how are the community representatives selected/elected. These shortcomings were brought up recently about the voting of the SplClassLoader RFC. This RFC tries to address those shortcomings.

The original voting RFC allowed two distinct groups to vote:

1. People with php.net SVN accounts that have contributed code to PHP
2. Representatives from the PHP community, that will be chosen by those with php.net SVN accounts

Group 1, can be interpreted multiple ways, and it was misunderstood more than once, so the possible interpretations:

• People having php-src karma, and at least one php-src commit.
• People having svn accounts and at least one commit (this could mean documentation, test, pear/pecl, web related, etc.)

Group 2, lacks the definition of how do we select those representatives.

• Maybe we could define different type of votes (language syntax change, adding new feature/extensions, etc.) and define the who can vote for each of those.
  • This could be a good middle-ground between allowing qa/documentation/web people to vote on language level RFCs or not.
• It is also a possibility to split the votes of the two groups “php devs” vs. “voice of the people”.
  • This could also solve the issue that the two group have a different number of participants.
  • By that reasoning, RFCs could only be approved if the php developers and the community representatives are both supporting the RFC.
    • Of course that is also possible to only require the php-devs vote to pass for accepting an RFC, and the community votes would be used as a measure or guide, but that would somehow made the voting rights moot for the reps.
• We have to consider that:
  • We have a large number of “sleeping” svn accounts
  • The number of active core developers are small, for example the DVCS RFC which had a large buzz, only had 65 people voting.
  • If there is no limit of the number of representatives, the reps can be the majority of the active participants.
• Maybe we could have a pending period for the newly accepted reps, so we won't have a situation that people start requesting voting rights right in the last minute for voting an RFC.
• What happens if there is multiple lead for a project? Either by co-authoring, or changes in the leadership. What happens if a representative lose the lead of the project which allowed him/her to be a representative?

0.1 - Throwing some ideas around.