[associated vote ended on 2023-11-08] Proposal: allow votes to be conducted in the forum

[felixfontein]

Summary

Right now the SC docs (https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/community/steering/community_steering_committee.html#community-topics-workflow) explicitly say that votes have to happen here. The forum allows us to also vote (https://forum.ansible.com/t/lets-try-a-vote-in-the-sc-style/150/9), and it's a lot easier there.

I'd propose that we also allow having votes in the Ansible Forum.

@ansible-community/steering-committee what do you think? Does anyone have reservations?

Additional Information

No response

[briantist]

Aye, looking forward to moving past the GH-based votes and the various issues/discussions/PRs and their associated notifications

[leogallego]

I would suggest setting a time-line and swapping votes to the forum directly as the proposal, having 2 places might be confusing, something like:

"starting on contributor summit (19th oct) votes for new topics will be created in the forum, and if there are ongoing community-topic votes, those will be kept in Github until finalized"

[acozine]

+1 to moving votes to the forum, it's optimized for this kind of work

[felixfontein]

I would keep community-topics as a backup for some time, in case voting in the forum breaks down unexpectedly. As @samccann suggested on Matrix, community-topics would only be used as a fallback, all new votes would be in the forum (if nothing bad happens).

[GregSutcliffe]

Thanks for starting this @felixfontein! Clearly my non-SC vote is in favour :)

More usefully - two thoughts. First, if voting "breaks down" in some way on the new forum please tell me as soon as possible. There's a lot of possible configuration / automation we can do, and if that fails I can involve CDCK to help us too. I think we all want this to work (given what we have to deal with here) so be as petty as you like because I want this to be a lovely experience ;)

Second, if there's anything I can do to help one or more folks get comfortable with the tooling, again get in touch. I did some fairly generic videos which I can do more of, or do some writing somewhere, or whatever would help.

Finally, because I know someone will ask, I have already created a tool to list all the open polls on the site (here and in the forum sidebar). You can search for polls using the native search but it returns closed polls, so I thought this would be better - and allows me to showcase linking up our forum with our data platform, which has many other uses ;)

[samccann]

My non-SC vote is +1 to moving to the forum. It raises visibility to what's being discussed here.

[gotmax23]

Proposal: Try out the forum for at least one vote and, if it goes well, all of October. I would like to have written documentation for the process and a steering-committee tag on the forum.

[cybette]

+1 (non-SC)

[maxamillion]

+1 ALL THINGS IN THE FORUM (non-SC)

[Andersson007]

+1 to all SC-related undertakings in the forum ASAP

[Andersson007]

Proposal: Try out the forum for at least one vote and, if it goes well, all of October. I would like to have written documentation for the process and a steering-committee tag on the forum.

@gotmax23 yes, let's do it after the first vote.
By the way, let's move this topic to the forum and vote on moving votes right there:)

UPDATED: Launching a quick vote here about trying things in the forum, would also work.

[Andersson007]

I possible vote here can be:

Allow new Steering Committee topics to be created and
related votes to be conducted in the forum within the trial period
without changing the Steering Committee guidelines.

The trial period will start after the vote ends, provided that the decision is positive,
and will end on November, 14, 2023.
Further topics and votes to happen in the forum will be possible
only after a corresponding Steering Committee guidelines change.
The final transition vote can happen in the forum at any time between November, 1 and November, 14,
or in community-topics after the trial period ends or it can not to happen at all if there's no initiative
(i.e. if SC doesn't want to use the forum).

Please vote +1/-1

Please don't vote right now:) It's just a vote wording proposal. I think if we give the vote a week, so the trial period will be roughly a month. Or we can make it longer, say, 2 month and vote on the SC policy change right there on the forum during the trial in case the majority is happy with it.
Ideas?

[felixfontein]

Do I understand the proposal right that we'd need another vote here in November to really transition to the forum?

How about, changing that part, so that if we decide to not continue using the forum after the end of the trial period, we have to start a vote in community-topics before November 14th (and, say, after November 1st).

[Andersson007]

@felixfontein i updated the proposal PTAL (i'm personally OK with any changes, so feel free to copy-paste, update, and put your version in a comment)

[felixfontein]

I would formulate it as follows:

Allow new Steering Committee topics to be created and
related votes to be conducted in the forum within the trial period
without changing the Steering Committee guidelines.

The trial period will start after the vote ends, provided that the decision is positive,
and will end on November, 14, 2023.
From then on, all votes and discussions will happen in the Forum.
If this is deemed unacceptable by any Steering Committee or community member,
a vote needs to be started to revert to github.com/ansible-community/community-topics
between November 1st and November 14th and has to be open for at least one week.
If that vote is accepted, voting will no longer be possible in the forum, but only here.

Please vote +1/-1

That way by default voting stays in the forum, except if we explicitly revert back here.

[felixfontein]

Ok, we talked about this at today's meeting. My (somewhat subjective) interpretation is:

1. We first want a draft PR for updating the SC docs that explains how exactly the process will work in the forum.
   • It was suggested to first prepare a text most are happy with in a forum wiki post (more precisely, this one: https://forum.ansible.com/t/draft-for-sc-voting-process-on-the-forum/1410).
   • Once we are happy enough someone turns it into a PR.
2. Once the PR is ready, we start a vote.
   • All SC members must be pinged (on GH) for that vote.
3. If the vote is accepted, we will have a ~one month trial period in which we do votes only in the forum.
4. By default, after the end of the trial period we will continue discussing and voting in the forum. No further action is necessary for this.
5. If someone wants to prevent that we continue voting in the forum, they have to create a vote here (in community-topics) that the trial period should not be extended.
   • That vote must not be started before at least half of the trial period is over.
   • The vote must run for at least one week.
   • All SC members need to be pinged (on GH and in the forum) for that vote, to make sure everyone is aware of it.

Does this sound good?

[Andersson007]

Does this sound good?

@felixfontein , absolutely!

[felixfontein]

We not have a vote in #279. Please vote :)

@ansible-community/steering-committee please note that this vote changes the way how votes work, so please take a look (and vote for or against it)!

[mariolenz]

The proposal says:

A steering committee member can tag the forum post with community-meeting to put it on the meeting agenda.

This tag was OK here, but it might be a little bit problematic in the forum where there are also other (sub-) communities active. It's a little bit ambiguous. Please see this post from @GregSutcliffe about this. And possibly also join the discussion there ;-)

It would be great if we could agree on the tag(s) to use before we transition things to the forum. Of course, we could change things in the future but somehow this feels only like the second-best solution.

[gotmax23]

I'd prefer to continue the discussion here. The discussion and votes about moving our processes to the forum should not happen there until we have actually agreed to do so.

[Andersson007]

Speaking about tags: this is a good point, though it's a detail and imo is not an obstacle to finish the vote and is not a reason to suspend it. Otherwise we'll never move:)

IMO

• community-meeting is fine as only SC forum group members will be allowed to apply it.
• sc-meeting is not fine as it is about the community.
• community-wg-meeting: can also work

[felixfontein]

I'm fine with community-wg-meeting if that solves the problems.

[Andersson007]

I'm fine with community-wg-meeting if that solves the problems.

@mariolenz @gotmax23 if you're OK too, I would update the PR. FYI today after lunchtime and tomorrow all day i won't be available, so feel free to push to my PR and commit or merge that one as-is after the vote ends and then open another PR

[gotmax23]

Would y'all be fine with changing it to community-wg-meeting and also extending the vote to Monday? I think we should extend the vote anyways, and if we're changing the proposal, we should at least give folks time to give it another look.

[gotmax23]

Also, if we are using community-wg-meeting, I'd prefer not to have community-meeting used at all (even for something other than our meeting) to avoid confusion.

[felixfontein]

Would y'all be fine with changing it to community-wg-meeting and also extending the vote to Monday? I think we should extend the vote anyways, and if we're changing the proposal, we should at least give folks time to give it another look.

In that case, we should also adjust the dates in the vote to ~a week later.

[felixfontein]

At today's meeting we discussed this, and decided as follows:

• change the steering-committee tag to community-wg;
• change the community-meeting tag to community-wg-nextmtg;
• extend the dates mentioned in the vote by one week;
• prolong the vote by one week.

We'll update the PR and the vote next, and then ping everyone who voted so far so they can reconsider their vote if they don't like these changes.

[felixfontein]

Ping @gotmax23 @acozine @felixfontein @leogallego @briantist @Andersson007 @mariolenz @gundalow @cybette @samccann - we adjust the running vote where you already voted according to #273 (comment). If you disagree with these changes, please adjust your vote and/or comment here. If you do not voice disagreement, we assume that your vote still stays +1.

[felixfontein]

I counted the following votes:

8 x +1 from SC members (gotmax23 acozine felixfontein briantist Andersson007 mariolenz gundalow russoz)
3 x +1 from community members (leogallego cybette samccann)

Could another SC member please count the votes? Thanks!

[gotmax23]

I can confirm @felixfontein's vote count!

[felixfontein]

A very first discussion in the forum: https://forum.ansible.com/t/stop-using-the-gh-com-ansible-community-meeting-agenda-for-the-community-wg-meeting/2243

[leogallego]

Created community-wg as an open tag, and community-wg-nextmtg limited to SC + ACT in the Forum