[AFS3-std] AFS Standardization Proposal

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Thursday, July 24, 2008 12:59:49 PM -0400 Steve Simmons 
<scs@umich.edu> wrote:

> Stagger the terms of the board.

There is no board, and no entity which has the authority to make executive 
decisions.  There is a chair, whose job is to keep the process moving, prod 
people who are being lame about their commitments, and judge consensus.  We 
have two chairs for redundancy, and stagger their terms for continuity. 
However, they do not vote; they each have independent authority to exercise 
all of the powers of the chair (which are limited).


> Require votes be pgp signed and the signing chain must have a current or
> former elder within two link. Upside: much harder to pack, as most
> vote-packing people would have to be hand-led through it plus whoever is
> doing the packing has to be within on link. Downside: elders would have
> to sign a lot of keys, vote counting is a pain in the ass.

The standardization body has no elders.  Perhaps you are confusing it with 
the OpenAFS project.  There is an explicit goal to avoid giving this level 
of control to any one vendor, including the OpenAFS project.  Even if you 
ignore that, this proposal is counterproductive in two ways:

(1) It makes vote-packing easier, not harder.  A person wishing to vote in
    good faith has to figure out PGP, generate a key, and then get their
    key signed by someone who is within one hop of the "core group" (elders
    or whatever), which may be inconvenient if they are geographically
    isolated from such groups.  On the other hand, a person wishing to
    pack votes is not obligated to use keys belong to real persons or to
    use good signing practices; all he has to do is get his key signed by
    a member of the core group (in practice, not any harder than it is
    for the isolated good-faith voter to get within two hops), then he
    can make up and sign as many keys as he wants.

(2) It encourages people to sign PGP keys just so their owners can vote.
    This is great if the signing is done reasonably, but not so great if
    some in the "core group" doesn't understand PGP and is willing to
    sign any key sent to them by email just to avoid disenfranchising
    voters.

> Have public elect some members of board, elders elect some members of
> board, current board elect some members of board.

Again, there is no board.


> Steve "just establishing my participation quota" Simmons

Under my original proposal, you're not, because this is a meta-discussion, 
not a technical one.

-- Jeff