[AFS3-std] Second Draft of Standardisation Document

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Thursday, August 28, 2008 11:27:55 AM -0400 Steven Jenkins 
<steven.jenkins@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 11:13 AM, Steve Simmons <scs@umich.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 27, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>>
>>> Simon Wilkinson <simon@sxw.org.uk> writes:
>>>
>>>> Rerunning the election, in whatever form, is likely to be time
>>>> consuming, and probably result in a vanishingly small turnout the
>>>> second time round. Should we just give the outgoing chair a casting
>>>> vote?
>>>
>>> Personally, I'd be comfortable with just flipping a coin.
>>>
>>> One way to flip a coin would be to give the position to whoever's MD5
>>> hash of their name lexicographically sorts earlier.  It has the minor
>>> potential drawback that the tiebreaker would be known in advance,
>>> though.
>>
>> I'd prefer that tie means fail. This is supposed to be setting standards,
>> which ought to be agreed at a near-consensus level. If we're tied,
>> clearly we've got no consensus.
>>
>
> That seems reasonable to me for protocol decisions, but the protocol
> decisions are already based on consensus (cf section 2.3.4).  The only
> elections I'm aware of that will occur are those made for personnel.

That's right -- we're talking about elections for chair, not voting on 
decision-making, which we will not be doing.  Normally, "fail" is not a 
valid outcome from an election (though Debian actually does this, with 
"fail" meaning "hold a new election", as many times as necessary.  But I 
don't think we need an process as complex as theirs).



> My suggestion is that the remaining chair breaks the tie.
>
> Yes, that leaves the decision in the hands of the remaining chair, but
> it follows the principle of 'the buck stops here', and it also
> reflects the responsibility in the hands of the chairs and the voters.

I'm not sure what you think that principle means.  Normally it refers to 
the concept of a single individual with ultimate decision-making power, who 
has both the ability to override any decision made by someone else and the 
inability to pass responsibility on to someone else.  We don't have anyone 
like that in our organization.


That said, I don't have any objection to giving the returning chair a 
casting vote, as was suggested previously.  However, we must cover the 
situations in which there is no returning chair, including the 
bootstrapping case.

-- Jeff