Re: Negative Votes (Re: workprocess - default process comments)

[Jon Bosak <bosak@boethius.eng.sun.com>]

[Terry Allen:]

| So *allow* justification, don't *require* it.  

Terry has persuaded me on this point.

[Sharon Adler:]

| I am not sure why we cannot try to build in some type of
| weighting if a negative vote has no useful information as to
| why this negative vote was issued.  To me it makes such a
| vote rather meaningless and arbitrary.  Negative votes
| should be constructive criticism or they can be a serious
| condemnation of the entire activity.

I agree, but in the absence of a process for automatically doing the
next version of a specification (which the ISO rule implies but which
personally I think is a really bad idea), the reasons attached to a
negative vote are just parting shots; they don't affect the tally.

What I find interesting about this discussion is that we all seem to
find the basic rule reasonable.  Since we have to decide this anyway
and we're already halfway there, let's see if we can go ahead and
finish up this one.  It would feel so good.

I propose that we adopt the following rule for approval of a committee
specification: it passes if two-thirds of all the voting members vote
"yes" and no more than one-fourth of the voting members vote "no."
Members voting "no" are allowed to attach reasons for their negative
vote to be entered into the record.

This attempts to set aside the question of what constitutes a voting
member.  We are getting to that whole issue very soon, but I'm hopeful
that we can decide this particular question while the recent
discussion is still fresh.

Jon