Halt the election

[Tad_Carlucci]

The election for board members should be halted.

Who are we voting for? We don't know.

How will they represent our interests? We don't know.

Will they actually be given the power to act upon their decisions? We don't know.

Who is allowed to vote? We don't know.

If allowed to vote, will your vote be counted? We don't know.

These questions should be worked out. And the discussion should include the community, and not be held in a forum which does not allow public comment. The election should be halted and only held once we can answer these basic questions.

[Gyra_Solune]

...i didn't even know there was an election?

But looking at it what I think you're referring to it's clearly an affair between the current prominent developers of the game. All they're doing is organizing which of them is best able to run the emerging legal matters that Wesnoth will need to concern itself with now that the game is expanding to further markets, namely Steam, and as such its trademarks and copyrights and all that must be further enforced (mostly so that someone doesn't run around trying to sell something Wesnoth-related on Steam and that the brand remains strictly free of charge). Neither you nor I are voting on anything, it's just the moderators of the game, so to speak, deciding who can handle a little extra on their plate.

[Tad_Carlucci]

So people like you and I are to be excluded from the process because our contributions do not make us 'prominent' enough?

There are 142 contributors to the GitHub project. I'm presently at around 40 on that list. But I'm not 'prominent'? Some of the nominees do not even appear there, and some are ranked well below me. Obviously actual contributions to the project are not the criteria.

And, look at the comments on their post-restricted thread. The people there don't know who some of the candidates are.

This election seems nothing more than a sham. It should be stopped and an open, fair and honest election should be held.

[Pentarctagon]

The candidates were decided here. The criteria used are also there:

EDIT: To be clear, anyone may nominate someone to the board. Only developers (those who have SVN write access) will be able to vote.

This is also stated in the actual election thread:

Any Wesnoth developer may vote. You are a Wesnoth developer if you have git write access or if you have contributed any significant content to Wesnoth which exists in the git repository.

So the question I have is: Did you ask anyone (such as Dave) for clarification before posting this thread?

[Tad_Carlucci]

Yes. I did. Some time ago. No response.

I do my work on GitHub. I was offered and chose NOT to accept commit rights at GitHub. But that is not the Subversion (SVN) system. I don't know where the SVN system is located, or if it's even available online and there are no instructions on this web site to locate it.

Public comment is DISABLED on the discussion thread.

So, if nobody cares to read and answer PMs, or even acknowledge they've received them, and the discussion is locked, AND the requirement is you have access to a secret server somewhere, how is this a fair and open election?

[Tad_Carlucci]

Wesnoth is important to me. Important enough that I devote a lot of time to improve the game for everyone.

I feel the election is important. I want to see Wesnoth under good management.

But who are these people and what will they be doing and why should I choose one or another of them?

And what does it matter if I don't have the secret handshake? There are comments on that same thread asking these same questions.

This entire election thing is a slap in the face to the people actually doing the work. It should be stopped and an honest, open, AND PUBLIC discourse should occur so we know what we're being asked to decide upon and can choose who we think if best suited to lead us there.

[Pentarctagon]

In that case, I have no idea why he wouldn't have replied to yours . In the two threads he does seem to have gotten PMs from at least a few people.

(Not meaning to insinuate anything, I genuinely have no idea.)

[Iris]

There isn’t a “secret server”, it’s just that Dave keeps referring to our repository as SVN despite having been involved in the migration to Git somehow. For the sake of completeness, the original SVN repository is still around but it’s been untouched for years for obvious reasons. So again, no, there is no secret server and all of Wesnoth’s official work is done in public repositories under the Wesnoth organization at GitHub. I can assure you we don’t even have billing information attached to the account so we’re literally unable to host private repositories there.

Tad, I have to admit that I haven’t been paying attention to Wesnoth since stepping down as general release manager in March, but all the nominees are people who are well known around the community and I can vouch for the contributions of every single one of them, including those that do not have Developers group membership. Maybe you don’t know them, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are people who do and who would consider them apt candidates for representing our community for legal matters, and making financial decisions about where our resources are spent. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to nominate everyone (especially people who are relatively new around here) and there are even some that were nominated but had to decline for one reason or another.

I do tend to feel that the nomination and election process is too short and perhaps not as inclusive as it ought to be, but please consider the following points:

• There have been a lot of contributors over the 13 years Wesnoth has existed, certainly, but the great majority of them are either retired, barely active anymore, or wouldn’t be able to wade their way through tedious paperwork.
• Many of our contributors (mostly artists and translators) do not have Git push access or Developers group membership because we can’t expect them to invest time and energy learning to use tools that are mostly tangential to their actual activities. As a rule of thumb, we’ve always preferred to offer push access only to people with whom we have regular contact over IRC so we can communicate more efficiently in the event of any special circumstances (feature freezes, new unreleased bugs, server downtime, etc.), and most of the time require them to submit two non-trivial pull requests (formerly patches) to the project platform and get them accepted. This doesn’t make the contributions of non-members any less important.
• Becoming a board member (or for that matter, any other kind of admin role in the project or community) isn’t as glamorous or important as it might seem at first glance. These people will have to hear and deal with opinionated people who don’t always choose the nicest words to get their points across, and somehow get their regular volunteer work done at the same time. They’re also relatively powerless in practical matters that don’t involve money because it’s impossible to demand unpaid volunteers to focus on specific tasks or work on other projects against their will. Furthermore, the Wesnoth Inc board does not govern the Battle for Wesnoth Project proper, which remains the domain of the project administration and the release manager.
• The new board hopefully will be better able to organize a new election or delegate part of their roles to other people in the community. At the very least, they will make sure to listen to the community and perform their duties accordingly, which is the whole point of this process. Bear in mind that right now the board effectively only consists of Dave and two inactive names, so perhaps demanding more of his time and energy right now wouldn’t be the best course of action for anyone involved.

Finally, if over the past few months you’ve devoted that much time to improving the game then you should really consider at least getting the Developers group membership (or Code & WML Contributors, the minimum for all people who’ve gotten any number of PRs accepted regardless of complexity) even if you don’t want push access. For this you should contact vultraz, our current general release manager.

[Dave]

Anyone who has contributed to Wesnoth in any significant way can vote. This includes people who had access to the SVN repo or now have access to the github repo or if you have simply produced any significant amount of content. (E.g. one full image or one hundred lines of code).

There are no secret handshakes around this process.

Anyone who meets these requirements could have been nominated in our nomination process and can now vote.

You sent me some suggestions which I read but did not have time to respond until now.

[Tad_Carlucci]

I am not complaining about not being nominated. I would have refused if I had been. It's not paperwork (been there, done that) or time (I'm retired, time I have in abundance) it's simply I am too old and too tired to do it all again (because, well, been there, done that, and the t-shirt turned into rags years ago).

If I had not seen the comments on the locked-out thread, I probably would have assumed it was just me. But, apparently, it's not. And that's what prompted me to comment today. I had asked Dave about it some time ago. I had assumed the lack of response simply mean I was the only one and didn't warrant even a reply. Well, tonight, at least, I learned he received it. (Thank you for that.)

What I dislike is being asked to consider a slate where there is no way to judge who might be qualified. Of course, I don't know many of them. But even a short bio or a statement about what they think they can bring to the table would help.

So, I just read Dave's response. He feels we should vote only if we feel we can make an informed decision. But he also feels that asking the candidates for a brief bio would prevent that by turning it into an essay contest.

Y'all do whatever you want, I guess.

As for me, I'll watch some episodes Game of Thrones and, in a day or two, I'll probably decide Dave can do whatever he wants, it really doesn't matter, and I'll get back to code-reading the mainline campaigns.

[Dave]

What I dislike is being asked to consider a slate where there is no way to judge who might be qualified. Of course, I don't know many of them. But even a short bio or a statement about what they think they can bring to the table would help.

So, I just read Dave's response. He feels we should vote only if we feel we can make an informed decision. But he also feels that asking the candidates for a brief bio would prevent that by turning it into an essay contest.

I can understand wanting the reassurance of a small bio on each candidate to understand who they are and perhaps what they stand for. But I think in this first election people will simply vote for who they know and trust based on interactions with them and I think that's okay.

If you don't really feel you know the candidates well enough to participate I think that's fine -- you can understand there is a process we are putting in place and perhaps in the next election you can participate. Like I said, I don't really see the sense in us putting some bios together and you deciding which bio you like best.

David

[Horus2]

Who are we voting for? We don't know.

How will they represent our interests? We don't know.

Will they actually be given the power to act upon their decisions? We don't know.

Who is allowed to vote? We don't know.

If allowed to vote, will your vote be counted? We don't know.

These questions should be worked out. And the discussion should include the community, and not be held in a forum which does not allow public comment. The election should be halted and only held once we can answer these basic questions.

What I dislike is being asked to consider a slate where there is no way to judge who might be qualified. Of course, I don't know many of them. But even a short bio or a statement about what they think they can bring to the table would help.

So, I just read Dave's response. He feels we should vote only if we feel we can make an informed decision. But he also feels that asking the candidates for a brief bio would prevent that by turning it into an essay contest.

While i am late to the uprising dispute, i feel obliged to show at least some sympathy toward OP.
I have been nominated for this out of the blue for one of these positions, i was undecided on it, and days later Dave informed me personally that only developers are eligible, which made declining the opportunity much easier. Now what i read here in shadowm's reply is that:

but all the nominees are people who are well known around the community and I can vouch for the contributions of every single one of them, including those that do not have Developers group membership.

So maybe i was eligible after all... Even so, i doubt many would place their bet on me, since i came from a very different direction and my name is probably still unknown for many in those circles. I am not fond of cover letters either, but it would made sense for me and all those who are in my shoes.

I am not here to protest and try to claim the positions; i think i can be more productive elsewhere and ultimately i would probably refused it anyway. I am just saying that rules were indeed hard to grasp, and certain lesser-known individuals did not have much chance from the beginning, while the widely-known contributors declined it one after the other due to being overwhelmed with work.

[Iris]

@Horus2:

I’m sorry to hear that. If what you are saying is true (and I don’t have any reasons to suspect otherwise) then someone didn’t properly decide on the requirements for the nominees and eventually did include two non-dev nominees, which coupled with the lack of concrete requirements for nominees in the original thread led me to believe it was acceptable for non-devs to be on the board, as it should be (the original board did include two people who were technically devs but didn’t really do any programming or VCS interaction). Although I certainly don’t like the precedent this sets, it is my hope that the new board will be more thorough in the future to avoid any further misunderstandings.

[Tad_Carlucci]

My intention was to walk away from this thread but I think I should say that, at this point, my hope is that shadowm's suggestions be seriously considered.