PHP RFC: Who Can Vote (2024)

• Version: 0.2
• Date: 2024-08-20
• Author: Jim Winstead, jimw@php.net
• Status: Draft
• First Published at: http://wiki.php.net/rfc/who_can_vote

The original voting RFC allowed two “audiences” to vote, but because the original VCS account system has fallen out of use new accounts are not being added there, and because the other audience of voters was simply left as “chosen by those with php.net VCS accounts” it has been not historically been a real avenue for people to obtain the ability to vote on RFCs.

This RFC establishes a list of voters who will be allowed to vote on future RFCs, and clearly define a process for new voters to be added, voters to remove themselves, or voters to be removed.

It proposes only the mechanism for adding and removing members, it does not seek to specify the criteria by which people are added or removed and instead leaves that up to the voting membership to decide.

The initial active voter list will consist of all those who have voted on any RFC between August 20, 2021 and August 20, 2024. (This is a list of approximately 140 people.)

The initial emeritus voter list will consist of all of those having a PHP VCS account prior to August 20, 2024. (This is a list of approximately 1,650 people.)

Any active voter can nominate someone else to be an active voter. The nomination must be seconded by another active voter. The nominee must affirmatively accept their nomination.

Any emeritus voter can nominate themselves to be an active voter. This requires no second.

At the end of each calendar month, a vote on all pending nominations (if any) will be taken. The vote will be open for two weeks. If a quorum of 1/3 of active voters is reached, any nominee that receives a majority of affirmative votes cast for their nomination will be added to the list of active voters. (Voters may abstain from voting on a specific nominee, a quorum is not required on the vote for each nominee, only across all nominations.) If a quorum of voters has been reached and a nominee does not receive a majority of affirmative votes, they will be deemed ineligible for re-nomination for six months. If a quorum is not reached, all nominations will be held over until the next round of voting.

Any active voter can request to be moved to the emeritus voter list at any time.

Any active voter can nominate a voter to be removed from the active and/or emeritus voter lists. This must be seconded by another active voter. This nomination will require the affirmative vote a super-majority (2/3) of the votes on that action.

At the beginning of each calendar year, those active voters who have not voted on any RFC or member vote in the previous three calendar years will be automatically moved to the emeritus voter list.

In the future, different tools may be developed to manage the list of voters, nominations, and voting, but the initial implementation will use existing tools:

• The lists of active and emeritus voters will be maintained within the wiki.php.net user system. The usernames will be public, additional information such as full names or contact information will be at the discretion of the voters.
• Nominations will take place on the internals@lists.php.net mailing list.
• Voting will take place using the wiki.php.net voting system with announcements about the opening of voting and results made to internals@lists.php.net.

• None yet!

Accept this process for maintaining a list of voters who can vote on RFCs. Yes/No

• https://wiki.php.net/rfc/voting_who -- abandoned RFC from 2017 on the same issue

• None yet.