While this is true in so far as the “co-design” process—which purported to be democratic and has been parroted as such—has proven to be far from it, voting is neither appropriate nor adequate in this context. I’ve never advocated for a democratic process, rather consensus decision-making, and ideally rough consensus. The strong selection bias of voters has already been raised, but “in some ways, we can’t vote” as the OSI’s door is open to all interested parties and “it’s nearly impossible to figure out who would get a vote for any given question”.
More problematic though is that the outcome (draft 0.0.9)—which does not reflect the intentions of participants in the working groups, let alone the wider community—is a product that cannot function for its intended purpose; it’s a two-legged stool… a car with no wheels. Even if it were functional, valid questions have been raised about whether it is practically enforceable in its current form.
As such, 0.0.9 must not be graduated to release candidate status in its current state, especially now both process and product are deficient, and I hope we’ll get confirmation from you today that won’t happen in our slot at Nerdearla tomorrow.
Not being one to propose problems without solutions, per @Mer’s own methodology, the cut-off was determined visually: “there’s a pretty big drop-off […] so this felt like a reasonable place to draw the line”. Ignoring the most egregious violation of democratic norms—selective superpowers of vote nullification—we see a similar step in a k-means cluster analyis for n=2 (among others).
As a practitioner, this looks to be a workable RC/1.0 starting point which could be refined over time like the OSD now at v1.9. You would get your on-time launch, the loudest dissenting voices would be silenced (to @nick’s point above), the OSI would avoid losing trust in the wider community, and those hoping for us to take a less ambitious approach could advocate for future revisions to be more permissive (per @spotaws’ recent public appeal to the board):
That’s certainly one conclusion you could draw, but I’m just shining light on the situation with statistics, and you’re welcome to check my work.
While Meta’s negating votes in the “Data” category (highlighted below) demonstrate an obvious pattern, it was actually @zack (“SZ”)—who has “consistently voted stating that availability of training datasets was a requirement for exercising both the freedom of study and the freedom of modify”—who was shocked to have inadvertently done the most damage to his cause. Fortunately, they didn’t realise they could have 4x’d their negative vote too!
