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Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

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Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#71

Post by em-bee »

ohazi wrote: post #58
ekianjo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's clear which way the tide is moving It's only clear that the way this is measured is heavily biased: 4 options out of 8 are against current FSF/RMS' statu quo. Only 2 are for supporting the statu quo. And 1 is for indifference, and the last one for more discussion needed. If you overcharge the negative choices, it's kind of given most of the answers will fall in them. Survey design 101. For reference: - Option…

You do realize that the community needs to propose and sponsor these options, right? Fewer people being willing to propose a pro-RMS option is an indication of which way the tide is moving, even if you still want to argue about why this might be the case.

it only takes a few people to sponsor options, and plenty of people have sponsored options that they would not vote for because they believed that these options should be available.

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#73

Post by [deleted] »

salawat wrote: post #69
Pfhreak wrote: post #6

If you look at the results they link, the picture becomes clearer. They proposed 8 options. 2 directly called for resignations at FSF, 2 directly supported RMS, one said to stop working with FSF, one said to call for governance improvements at FSF, one was no comment, and one was discuss further. The two options in support of RMS were not majority held opinions, and were held by ~1/6-1/3 of voters. No comment beat "c…

What in the hell is with that tabulation of data? You don't even have raw vote counts. You have that weird floating relative representation going on, and no formula is given for the totals, or I'm not aware the procedures are that line that out. Example: 2 dimensional matrix Value at (x, y) coordinates should be read as option X received more votes than option Y. The diagonal is blank since it degenerates in this rep…

[deleted]

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#74

Post by ohazi »

em-bee wrote: post #71
ohazi wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that the community needs to propose and sponsor these options, right? Fewer people being willing to propose a pro-RMS option is an indication of which way the tide is moving, even if you still want to argue about why this might be the case.

it only takes a few people to sponsor options, and plenty of people have sponsored options that they would not vote for because they believed that these options should be available.

That's exactly my point. If sponsoring options is done by the community, and is relatively easy, then fewer proposed options in one category does suggest that this category is unpopular with the community.

If there are several variations of anti-RMS proposals, it suggests that enough people care about the specifics of how the rebuke is worded, etc., but that generally there is enthusiasm about an anti-RMS stance.

If there are fewer pro-RMS proposals, then either they were proposed by people who don't support that option, but are putting it forward because they think it should exist as an option (as you suggest), or because there are fewer people who are enthusiastic enough to care about the minutia of how a support message is to be worded. Either way, that seems to me like less enthusiasm around an anti-RMS proposal.

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#75

Post by [deleted] »

salawat wrote: post #69
Pfhreak wrote: post #6

If you look at the results they link, the picture becomes clearer. They proposed 8 options. 2 directly called for resignations at FSF, 2 directly supported RMS, one said to stop working with FSF, one said to call for governance improvements at FSF, one was no comment, and one was discuss further. The two options in support of RMS were not majority held opinions, and were held by ~1/6-1/3 of voters. No comment beat "c…

What in the hell is with that tabulation of data? You don't even have raw vote counts. You have that weird floating relative representation going on, and no formula is given for the totals, or I'm not aware the procedures are that line that out. Example: 2 dimensional matrix Value at (x, y) coordinates should be read as option X received more votes than option Y. The diagonal is blank since it degenerates in this rep…

[deleted]

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#76

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

zackees wrote: post #47
Pfhreak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the letter that details the concerns about RMS: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix It's significantly more detailed and complex than "allegedly defending Epstein". Here's the letter supporting RMS: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/

That open letter against RMS is so cringe. The people who are attempting to purge him sound like intolerant, wanna-be dictators.

When studying history, I sometimes wonder - how certain things could have happened? Some of these seem ridiculous or unbelievable when you look back.

Now I know how it happens. Some people do something strange, then their number increases, they are very vocal, they're 100% sure what they do is right, they're very emotional about it, and at a certain point it seems like they are the majority. They do certain things like revolutions, usually with a bad result, and you can't do anything, you can just watch it powerlessly and hope it doesn't end badly this time.

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#77

Post by swebs »

swebs wrote: post #67
Pfhreak wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Do you have evidence that anonymity would have mattered? The vote totals seem in line with historical votes.

Are you asking for evidence that secret ballots prevent voter intimidation? Or evidence that people are harassed online for their stance on this specific issue?

>our comparison of survey results with official election truth indicates that the use of a so-called secret ballot yields more accurate, valid self-reports of voting on socially sensitive ballot issues, such as supporting taxes for elderly services.

https://academic.oup.com/poq/article-abstract/59/4/568/19401...

>regression analysis shows that social forces appear to have a greater effect on vote choices among people who doubt the formal secrecy of the ballot.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23526132

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#78

Post by fsf4lyfe »

zajio1am wrote: post #61
gerhardhaering wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to see how any of this is intolerant, or transphobic. You might not like these opinions. Or disagree that there is good reasoning behind some of this. This does not make the one you are disagreeing with intolerant.

> I fail to see how any of this is intolerant, or transphobic. Yes. RMS argued for gender-neutral pronouns since more than twenty years ago. Just because it is a different set of neutral pronouns than is popular today, some people mark him transphobic. That is absurd.

Indeed, and it's no surprise that this attempted cancellation of RMS is being pushed by the pronoun enthusiast crowd. These tend to be the type of people who simply can't stand any dissenting opinions to their dogma.

Unfortunately, the more tolerant attitude of just agreeing to disagree seems to have gone out of fashion. Now the preferred option is to destroy a person's entire career and slander their reputation with deliberate misinterpretations of what they've said and done.

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#79

Post by gizmo686 »

salawat wrote: post #69
Pfhreak wrote: post #6

If you look at the results they link, the picture becomes clearer. They proposed 8 options. 2 directly called for resignations at FSF, 2 directly supported RMS, one said to stop working with FSF, one said to call for governance improvements at FSF, one was no comment, and one was discuss further. The two options in support of RMS were not majority held opinions, and were held by ~1/6-1/3 of voters. No comment beat "c…

What in the hell is with that tabulation of data? You don't even have raw vote counts. You have that weird floating relative representation going on, and no formula is given for the totals, or I'm not aware the procedures are that line that out. Example: 2 dimensional matrix Value at (x, y) coordinates should be read as option X received more votes than option Y. The diagonal is blank since it degenerates in this rep…

Voting procedure is documented here [0] section A.6

I agree that it would be nice to include the total number of ballots in the final results, but that isn't really relevant to the results.

Each voter submits a ranked choice vote ballot. The table indicates that 113 ballots prefer option 1 over option 2, whicl 137 ballot prefer option 2 over option 1.

The majority calculation is a bit weird. All Debian votes include default option, in this case that is option 8, "Further Discussion". Preferring an option over the default is seen as a general "approval" vote, while prefering the default is considered "disapproval". The "majority" votes looks at the ratio between approval and disapproval. For instance, option 1 had 203 votes to apporove and 186 votes to disaprove, giving it a ratio of 203/186 = 1.09

Voters are not required to vote on all options. Excluding private votes, they release every individual vote once voting is closed, so you can see how many abstensions an indidual option received; but it appears that this has not been released yet.

[0] https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution

Re: Debian votes to make no statement regarding RMS readmission to the FSF board

#80

Post by luckylion »

ghaff wrote: post #65
luckylion wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to know what people really think without the possibile influence of preference falsification, it needs to be an anonymous poll. Which is exactly why we not only allow, but actually enforce it in elections. If your vote could have a strong impact on e.g. your future employment, you wouldn't be free to vote for what you think is best, you'd be compelled to vote for what you think is perceived best.

Except that's not Debian's agreed-to voting process. I'd also point out that secret ballot is not universal in the US. Certainly the votes of elected officials are not secret. But neither are open votes at, say, a town hall meeting.

> Except that's not Debian's agreed-to voting process.

I'm not suggesting they'd have to do that, I'm saying that there's a very good reason why we usually do that. As organizations become more and more political, I expect that to hit harder and for more of them to adopt secret voting.

> Certainly the votes of elected officials are not secret.

And I find that reasonable. You want to know whether the person you voted for actually does what they said. In Germany, parliament votes are public, but important votes are secret.

For the less important votes, they'll just ask for raised hands and note who won, but not who voted in what way (we now have TV channels film the votes and then use interns to determine who voted what).

For important votes, they're done secretly: you can tell who voted, but not what they voted for. There's no way to hold them accountable, the system is working as intended.

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