Oh yeah, keeping the votes secret during the vote and then revealing them at the end doesn’t make any sense. That would be the worst of all worlds :-).
When I say “public ballot” I’m imagining something like PEP 8001’s current text, where the core devs are able to see the votes, and modify their own vote, all the way until the end. Basically the same experience as these Discourse polls we’ve been running.
Huh, I think these polls are actually a good example of how a public ballot can aid in discussion! I wasn’t saying anything about the advantages of public ballots before, because I genuinely had no idea that anyone would disagree :-). And this discussion would be going very differently if the poll were sitting at 9:1 in favor of public ballots, or 5:5, instead of 9:1 in favor of private like it is now.
Of course, maybe everyone else thinks this discussion is useless, or that my posts here are “political pressuring”. I hope not. The reason I started this subthread is that the poll revealed a substantial gap between how I understand things and how other folks understand things, and IME it’s often useful to explore those, because there are all kinds of possible beneficial outcomes: (a) it turns out that I’m the only one who’s thought of some critical problem and everyone changes their mind!, (b) it turns out that I’m the only one who missed some critical problem, so I switch positions and now we have a unanimous vote!, (c) it turns out that we’re not actually talking about the same thing in the first place (the idea of keeping the votes private during the election and then revealing them definitely never occurred to me), (d) when the side in the minority realizes that they’re in the minority, they become suddenly motivated to find some compromise that makes everyone even happier than any of the original options, (e) nothing changes but people on the losing side at least have some time to get used to that idea and feel that they at least made a full case for their position, (f) … well you get the idea …
I guess we could get many of these advantages by holding a Discourse poll ahead of time.
I am quite concerned about being able to change votes, and especially about the following scenario, which seems very possible to me:
- We announce the start of actual voting
- People start actually reading the PEPs, now that they have to do something about them
- They start posting about things they like/dislike
- In the resulting discussion, we realize that a PEP has some issues, or someone comes up with a wildly popular new idea
- Oh crud now we’re running an election that we know doesn’t have what we actually want in it
Merely being able to adjust votes doesn’t totally solve this, but it definitely mitigate things a bit. In the vote-by-Github-commit model in the original PEP 8001, if we do end up with new ideas happening during the poll, we would have lots of options to smoothly adjust course, e.g. announce that we’re extending the voting period a week and ping the people who’ve already voted to make sure they know about what’s and have a chance to adjust their votes.