A vote has been proposed in Debian to change the formal procedure in Debian by which General Resolutions (our name for "votes") are proposed. The original proposal is based on a text by Russ Allberry, which changes a number of rules to be less ambiguous and, frankly, less weird.

One thing Russ' proposal does, however, which I am absolutely not in agreement with, is to add a absolutly hard time limit after three weeks. That is, in the proposed procedure, the discussion time will be two weeks initially (unless the Debian Project Leader chooses to reduce it, which they can do by up to one week), and it will be extended if more options are added to the ballot; but after three weeks, no matter where the discussion stands, the discussion period ends and Russ' proposed procedure forces us to go to a vote, unless all proposers of ballot options agree to withdraw their option.

I believe this is a big mistake. I think any procedure we come up with should allow for the possibility that we may end up with a situation where everyone agrees that extending the discussion time a short time is a good idea, without necessarily resetting the whole discussion time to another two weeks (modulo a decision by the DPL).

At the same time, any procedure we come up with should try to avoid the possibility of process abuse by people who would rather delay a vote ad infinitum than to see it voted upon. A hard time limit certainly does that; but I believe it causes more problems than it solves.

I think insted that it is necessary for any procedure to allow for the discussion time to be extended as long as a strong enough consensus exists that this would be beneficial.

As such, I have proposed an amendment to Russ' proposal (a full version of my proposed constitution can be seen on salsa) that hopefully solves these issues in a novel way: it allows anyone to request an extension to the discussion time, which then needs to be sponsored according to the same rules as a new ballot option. If the time extension is successfully created, those who supported the extension can then also no longer propose any new ones. Additionally, after 4 weeks, the proposed procedure allows anyone to object, so that 4 weeks is probably the practical limit -- although the possibility exists if enough support exists to extend the discussion time (or not enough to end it). The full rules involve slightly more than that (I don't like to put too much formal language in a blog post), but they're not too complicated, I think.

That proposal has received a number of seconds, but after a week it hasn't yet reached the constitutional requirement for the option to be on the ballot.

So, I guess this is a public request for more support to my proposal. If you're a Debian Developer and you agree with me that my proposed procedure is better than the alternative, please step forward and let yourself be heard.

Thanks!