As far as I’m aware a large amount of people keep suggesting this software including myself. And I think it would be a good place to start.
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If we decide to elect the steering committee / bootstrap group (which I recommend that we do), let’s be explicit about wanting to avoid bikeshedding at THIS point (only). I believe there’s a lot of detail that has to be got right about democracy in most circumstances (for example, I think ranked choice is important) but in THIS case there is not going to be much controversy, and I suggest we bite the bullet and get it over with.
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U2F/FIDO2 is designed to be unlinkable as a privacy feature. You can set up two accounts with the same website using the same token and the website will not be able to link these together based on the token responses.
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Agreed, I dont think we should spent too much time on the details. Let me see if I can help wrap this up and get something rubber-stamped for phase 1.
The three concerns I had for voting were/are
- Algorithm
- What accounts are allowed to vote
- Duration (making sure everyone gets a chance to vote)
So as a good-enough proposal:
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Loomio, with ranked choice voting for casting a vote.
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For now:
- No accounts created during a vote will be allowed to vote in that poll
- Phone numbers will NOT be used to validate people, probably/hopefully they never will
- In a future phase, a stack-overflow-like minimum reputation kind of system might be used to grant accounts voting permission. For now, all discourse accounts will have permission
- [New] Handling suspicious accounts
- I know this might seem like bike-shedding but I’m an Eagle scout, so I feel the need to have a plan for worst case scenarios. A half baked plan is certainly better than no plan at all.
- If an account is suspicious, it can be put “on trial” by the founding crew (everyone present in the discourse at this moment since we are pretty confident there are no bad actors/bots/alt-accounts rn). Thats basically the TLDR, the rest of the points are for more and more dire situations, along with boilerplate details that need to be explicit before a bad thing happens.
- All of the polls mentioned here are binary and therefore do not need ranked choice (therefore we can just have each as a new topic with a discourse poll)
- For an account to be barred from voting, I think we should require 7 people to agree (not just 1 guy and three friends). After 7 agree, then it needs to be a 4-of-7 majority to mark an account as a non-voting account. For example, 5-vs-3 is not enough, gotta be 7-vs-0, 7-vs-5, or 8-vs-6 to make an account loose voting permission. (Still not banned, just can’t vote)
- There’s different thresholds of confidence (like, beyond a resonable doubt, highly likely, more than likely, some possibility, etc) but I think that is getting into the details too much so I just want to explicitly say: each voter should be allowed to pick their own threshold based on the context, and declare what threshold they are personally using. A vote will be a vote regardless. E.g. aruging its “not beyond a reasonable doubt though!” will not be a rules-based argument.
- If there are not enough voters/watchers (checking messages can be pretty tedious) the steering committee can vote without the threshold of 7 people, but with the threshold of 2/3rds majority. So, given that less than 7 non-steering crew members even looked at the account, then a 2-vs-1 vote by steering members would still block the account from having a vote. However, to be clear, if more than 7 non-steering crew members vote, then that “community” vote takes precedence.
- There’s not really a trial, but rather a continual assessment. Meaning reassessment of an account can happen if, for some reason, suddenly many crew members become interested or change their mind (ex: new evidence presented).
- Mods, for now, just keep a list of non-voting accounts. (Which will hopefully just remain as an empty list).
- Finally, in a true worst-case scenario, in the event of an outright attack (a flood of bot and/or alt accounts mixed with legitimate accounts), the steering committee may “pause” polls or {accounts and polls} (but not { pause accounts and not pause polls}) for up to 7 days, while the non-steering crew members vote, over the course of 6 days, whether or not “yes we are under attack, activate/allow emergency powers”. It would be a 2/3rds majority, non-steering crew would be unaffected by “pauses” on this vote and only this vote. If the vote fails, the dissenting members vote for the “cool down time” duration and stipulaitons on the steering committee’s pause abilities, and the paused accounts must go through a normal trial to be revoked. The cool down time could very well (even ideally) be 0, if the disenters believe the committee did the right job of pausing the account/poll long enough for the community to vote on the suspicious account. If the vote succeeds however, the steering committee/boot group is granted the “judge, jury, and executioner” permission to start thowing out accounts (both vote permission, and/or total removal) without a proper “trial”. This power, once active, can be extended to the SIG leaders, and even SIG members if the situation is deemed bad enough by the steering committee. The crew who voted positively for the emergency powers then participates in a “toggle sum” of when these powers are deactivated. And, in a weird edgecase, even if an account is blocked from voting on everything else by the steering committee, if the account voted in support for emergency powers then it retains the right to be a part of the “toggle sum” for deactivation (even if it can’t vote on anything else). The deactivation isn’t a poll but rather will simply occur as soon as 50% of the activation-support voters change their preference from prefer “active” to prefer “deactive”. If some of the original voters do not toggle or schedule a toggle, and have no activity for 10 days, they are removed from the pool (effectively lowering the bar required to achieve 50%)
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Duration
- Unlike the other stuff, I’m not as confident in how to handle this, I just know its important and we need some kind of footnote on it.
- I lean on the side of slower polls because my life is busy and I often miss things.
- A standard ≥1 week duration for polls is my best request at a good-enough standard for now.
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Just want to ping on this^ specifically duration.
- The logo nominations didnt feel great.
- Not posted in announcements
- Default of two day duration, during the middle of the work week
- While I got in (as far as I’m concerned) there could be people who havent even seen the post yet.
So @ steering team I’m asking for
- Polls either go in announcements or their own poll-section so interested people don’t miss a poll announcement
- For a duration
- I think either we come to a general consensus that 1 week is the minimum for nominations and voting durations
- Or we host a ranked choice vote for a minimum duration, and give it a conservatively long duration to make sure everyone is heard.
- Last I just want to note; SIG members, like myself, and steering members are members BECAUSE we are somewhat chronically online. There is a built-in bias for short vote times here. There are many important contributors to nix that are not chronically online, and short durations cut them out of the picture.
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Not much to add really, I just agree.
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Agreed. The reason I made this one short was due to us having already had a week and a half of people creating logo concepts. I figured that at this point we just needed to decide on one. Moving forward polls and submission times will be extended so more people can participate.
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Okay 
so just confirming, this means a minimum one week duration for nominations/votes, and polls will be put in the announcement section?
(At least community polls on something with consequences that probably last ≥ 6 months)
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Yes. The duration of some processes may increase beyond 1 week as necessary. Whether the announcements section is the best place to have such things in the future may also change. Though the goal being to resolve the issues you mentioned above
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