[aur-general] [tu-bylaws] [PATCH] Honor TUs who become active/inactive during votes

[Xyne]

Sébastien Luttringer wrote:

>The question we have to answer is : How many TU are necessary to have
>a motion pass.
>Set the quorum to this value and _stop_ cheating by :
>- creating more valid voters than others (the active)
>- find ways to ignore the quorum is not reach (so the vote has no meaning)
>
>Cheers,

Hi,

Sorry for starting a new thread with my own proposal. I wrote it before reading
through the rest of my inbox.

Now that I have, I'll summarize my own suggestions, which have changed
since reading through this thread, and which re-iterate the general consensus
that you are already approaching.

The distinction between "active" and "inactive" TUs is meaningless and should
be removed from the bylaws, including the definition of quorum. Quorum will
therefore be some fixed percent of all TUs. As stated in this thread, up to 1
in 3 can skip the vote, and omitting "inactive" TUs defeats the purpose of
quorum. There will therefore be no need for an "active" flag on TU user
accounts on the AUR.

I still like my own suggestion for amending the removal section to add the
special case for TUs who have not touched [community], AUR or the mailing list
in 2 months. I believe that accomplishes the real goals of the current clauses
regarding unannounced inactivity and quorum blocking. All other cases in which
a TU is perceived to be avoiding his or her duties can be handled by the
standard removal procedure.

With the removal of the distinction between "active" and "inactive", I also
like the idea of establishing quorum when the vote is opened. TUs who are added
during the voting period (due to a parallel vote) will not be allowed to
participate in the ongoing vote. 

However, TU removals and resignations must be addressed. TUs who are up for
removal must not be allowed to vote on their own removal, and maybe not on
other votes either. TUs who resign (before the vote ends) should be removed from
the quorum calculation. If they have voted, their vote should also be removed.

For the former, a removal vote type that bars the removal candidate from voting
and quorum calculations should be easy enough to implement. For resignations, a
hook would be needed when a TU account is reset to a normal user account. The
hook would simply check ongoing votes, remove the TU from the quorum list, and
remove the vote if one has been cast. I don't know if the vote itself is stored
in the table though, so that might require more work. If it has to be
implemented, I would like it to be temporary. When the vote ends, the
association of participants to their votes should be removed, an only the list
of participants and the final tally should be retained.

Some thought must be given to whether TUs who are up for removal may
participate in other votes. With the current bylaws, any 2 TUs can remove all
other TUs by motioning for their removal. Only those 2 TUs would be able to
vote so they would be able to pass all the motions with 100% participation and
100% yes votes. It might be enough to modify the voting restriction to forbid a
TU from voting on his or her own removal only. Perhaps we could even add some
clause that suspends other votes until the removal vote has passed. For the
bylaws that would require the addition of a clause to the SVP section.
Programmatically, all new vote proposals would be blocked if a removal vote is
running.

The clause should probably also specify that removal votes take precedence over
any other pending votes except removal votes.


Regards,
Xyne

p.s.  you can stop CC'ing me now ;)