[FFmpeg-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Repeat vote: GA voters list updates

[Anton Khirnov]

Quoting Michael Niedermayer (2023-11-12 19:02:31)
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 06:43:28PM +0100, J. Dekker wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 12, 2023, at 18:31, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> > > On Sun, Nov 12, 2023 at 11:03:21AM -0300, James Almer wrote:
> > >> On 11/12/2023 10:59 AM, Thilo Borgmann via ffmpeg-devel wrote:
> > >> > I will also start the repeat vote now and everybody can hold their
> > >> > horses before going to flamewar. Depending on JB's explanations, he
> > >> > might still prove that the old vote is valid and this repeat vote
> > >> > becomes void.
> > >> 
> > >> Or you could have waited for his answer before doing the vote, don't you
> > >> think? Now people got a new vote email that may or may not be valid at all.
> > >
> > > I hope this new vote will result in the same winner as the last
> > > because otherwise we will have more questions and accusations
> > 
> > Multiple people (including myself) have already posted their voting URLs publicly
> > so this 'vote' outcome will be extremely questionable at best.
> 
> i saw it.
> I guess its your right to protest that way, its your ballot
> 
> its a bit unfortunate.
> i have not really finished investigating what exactly happened in the
> previous vote, but more information is still trickling in.
> There where mistakes made in the previous vote though i doubt they
> affected the outcome, but i do not know

There were mistakes made in this "vote" as well. Even disregarding the
question of its legitimacy, Thilo's list had two duplicates. After
removing them (which it's not clear whether Thilo did - so much for
transparency), it was identical to JB's list except for Thilo's having
three fewer entries.

One is Gautam, who AFAICT has not had any contact with the project
since 2020.

One is Ting Fu, whose Intel mailbox no longer exists, and so his
presence or absence on the list does not matter as he cannot receive the
voting link.

One is Thilo himself, who was added to the list after his assertion that
he voted in 2020 and so should vote now [1]. In other words, he asked to be
added to the list and then used his presence on it to argue that the
list is invalid. Draw your own conclusions about this.

Overall I simply do not see how is stoking the flames and feeding the
drama supposed to help the project. The main issue is that we, as a
project, failed in 2020 to make the process sufficiently clear, so any
voter list can be questioned. Thankfully it does not matter, because the
result of the vote was so overwhelmingly in favor of one option, that
none of the proposed alternative lists could possibly change it.

I would thus propose to end wasting time on meaningless arguments and
move on to something actually productive, like reviews, patches, and the
rest of the two proposed votes.

> I think anton, thilo and jb should have paused the votes and waited
> until we fully understand the previous votes issues.
> now it becomes only more messy
> previous vote, repeat vote, some agree some disagree thats the right path
> next votes following on top of ?
> some calls to changes to vote admin, some calls to change vote superviser
> some calls to change server
> 
> in a week we have 8 servers 16 vote admins 32 vote supervisers and 64
> different outcomes of the previous vote
> 
> we can get rich by renting out all that vote infra we soon will have ;)

The only reason to have our own vote server in the first place was that
the one run by its author [2] did not implement proportional
representation at the time. That has now changed, so I propose we simply
switch to it.

[1] http://lists.ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2023-October/316367.html
[2] https://civs1.civs.us/

-- 
Anton Khirnov