Please provide an example where voting brought to some really good decision at openSUSE. It usually leads to endless discussions without a clear decision, and forces to compromises which are often not in the interest of the distribution. You don't have to take "open decisions" in an open project. You need to take decisions in the interest of the project, the fact that they are open or not does not matter much. So, to make it short, I agree with what Druid said. Best, A. Il giorno mar, 04/08/2009 alle 15.14 +0200, Lars Marowsky-Bree ha scritto:
On 2009-08-04T09:58:37, Druid <marcio.ferreira@gmail.com> wrote:
I dont think voting works. Maybe the decision should be made by a technical commitee, or the release manager, or the board, I dont know. But wide vote I dont believe it works at all.
This is quite opposite to the literature, by the way. Decision-markets, through polling a large audience and aggregating the results, deliver excellent and empirically sound feedback on the usefulness of features. They're an excellent and open way of gathering "market research" data. Compared to focus groups or expert panels, they have a pretty good accuracy, are cheaper to setup, and by definition "more open".
Of course, you must describe them properly (ie, use case/benefit, not the detailed technical specification) - users are the wrong group to vote on the _implementation_, but the only group that can reliably vote on the usefulness.
Now it's true that some aspects of voting in bugzilla aren't appropriate for this - for example, decision markets try to avoid feedback loops, so the votes from other users shouldn't necessarily be exposed, but those are more or less implementation details.
I can dig out some references in case someone is really interested.
But "expert judgment", in particular if it is only one expert, has - both for market research and effort estimation, by the way - an extremely bad track record, yet it often is the best (-> only) tool we have, which is somewhat of a pity.
Regards, Lars
-- Architect Storage/HA, OPS Engineering, Novell, Inc. SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org