[AFS3-std] AFS Standardization Proposal

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Monday, August 04, 2008 10:29:45 AM -0700 Russ Allbery 
<rra@stanford.edu> wrote:

> Simon Wilkinson <simon@sxw.org.uk> writes:
>
>> Personally, I believe that establishing any kind of competence hurdle is
>> going to be extremely difficult to manage. I'd be interested in
>> proposals of exactly how such a hurdle could be defined without
>> introducing a significant level of subjectivity to the electoral
>> process. Without a competence definition that avoids the need to make
>> subjective decisions, my personal view is that we can't introduce an
>> eligibility requirement.
>
> I personally lean mildly in this direction as well.

So, as written, your document has an elgibility requirement; namely, it 
requires that one be subscribed to the mailing list at a particular instant 
in time.  My concern was primarily that this might disenfranchise people 
who for whatever reason are not subscribed at that instant, either because 
they read without being directly subscribed or because some transient 
problem causes them to be unsubscribed at an inopportune moment.

To address this, I proposed two main changes.  One was to use a period of 
time rather than a particular instant.  That is, instead of "on May 1" or 
whatever it said, use "in the last 6 months".  This protects against 
transient problems, preventing people from being disqualified from voting 
just because their mail provider has a bad day at the wrong time.

The second change was to use posting, rather than subscription, as the 
test.  I included somewhat vague criteria for what posts would qualify, but 
I'm not strongly attached to that language; it was just a strawman.  If 
people feel it's simpler or fairer to simply count _any_ post, that's fine. 
Similarly, maybe it would be better to use "subscribed or posted" as a 
test; in they way, we exclude neither people who lurk without saying much 
nor people who read via some kind of gateway (but we do still exclude 
people who read via a gateway and never post; I think that's an acceptable 
limitation).

> In my opinion we should remove the language about where these
> functions are hosted from the document at present

I completely agree.  I don't believe specifying the details of where things 
are hosted or what software is used or the like is at all appropriate in a 
document at this level.


Is determining who is the electorate really the only open issue?


-- Jeff