Adding a "deadline" for seconding a vote of no confidence

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I support a deadline of two weeks, and also suggest a deadline of one week.

Any vote of no confidence will introduce uncertainty to the Python project until the vote falls or a new council/member is elected.

The steering council election has nomination and voting phases. PEP 13 says “each phase lasts one to two weeks, at the outgoing council’s discretion”. To date, each phase has been two weeks, plus about week or two between phases for admin such as compiling the voter roll and so on. An outgoing council may select shorter phases to bring stability sooner, but it could be up to four weeks.

  1. First call
  2. Deadline until seconded
  3. Two week vote of no confidence
  4. One to two week SC nominations
  5. One to two week SC election

If the deadline is two weeks, the minimum time of uncertainty would be between 6 and 8 weeks, plus admin.

This is a long time, around 15% of a regular SC term, during which I imagine a council may be unwilling to make big decisions.

Therefore I suggest the seconding time is one week to help bring stability sooner. This would make the whole process a minimum of between 5 and 7 weeks, plus admin.

In addition to the SC election phases being potentially one week long, PEP 13 also defines the core team vote as one week.

Note that whatever deadline is chosen, if a seconder does not come forward in that period, nothing stops the original caller from issuing a fresh call as soon as the deadline expires.

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