PEP 8014: The Commons Model

I don’t understand if you would like real anarchy or a strict council? Don’t say both, I don’t see how having council which take decision is compatible with anarchy.

In my Comparison of the 7 governance PEPs you wrote “PEP 8014 has no hierarchy.” But your PEP describes a Council of Elders which “take decisions”… but it’s really difficult for me to understand the limits of its power and which can of decisions they can take. Since you wrote “There does need to be an “emergency brake” procedure to remove the whole council”, I understand that the Council does have power. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a process to remove it?

It’s also unclear who vote. You modified my summary of PEPs to write “vote (open to anyone)” for the PEP process, but it’s not very explicit from your PEP. For a vote on a PEP, who decides if a PEP requires “majority” or “real majority”? By the way, would it be possible to have number for “majority”? For some people, majority means 50%+1, for others it means >= 2/3. Please see my Maths on vote majority thread. First I used 50%+1, but then I realized that it can be dangerous to approve a PEP when “half” of core devs dislike it. So I changed “majority” to 2/3. See maybe Annex: Summary on votes of my PEP 8015.

It’s also very unclear who can be part of the Council and how the Council is created. In my summary, I left a “?” for the election part. The duration of mandate is not described neither. “it is probably good if members serve for a fairly long time” What does “long time” mean? 1 year? 5 years? 10 years? 26 years as Guido? I don’t ask you to write an exact value in your PEP, but maybe write a range like 5-10 years.

It seems to be a deliberate choice of you to be unclear, but I dislike your PEP because of that. I’m not comfortable with it. I’m not even talking about the way decisions are taken, but the fact that I don’t know if the Council can decide that they will start to approve PEPs themselves, block the promotion of a core dev, eject some core developers, change the governance, etc. It seems like it’s not your intent, but it’s not written down.

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