[FFmpeg-devel] Democratization

[James Almer]

On 2/1/2025 11:46 AM, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 10:21:37PM +0100, Niklas Haas wrote:
>> On Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:51:27 +0100 Nicolas George <george at nsup.org> wrote:
>>> Niklas Haas (12025-01-29):
> [...]
> 
>>> *Some members* of
>>> what you call community have expressed violent opposition to Michael.
>>> But *other members* have expressed, support for Michael, yet other
>>> members have agreed to arguments on both side successively, and the
>>> majority have not expressed anything.
>>
>> The CC was elected by a majority of the GA, so for all intents and purposes,
>> the CC is the closest representation of the majority opinion as we are
>> likely to ever have.
> 
> 1. The GA does not represent the community

It does by definition. It's a list of the currently most active people, 
by either meeting a agreed upon criteria or by agreed exception if they 
don't meet it but are active in other forms.

> 2. The GA is vulnerable to a simple governance attack
> 3. The CC vote period was extended by the person running the vote while he asked
>     specific people to join.

You're aware that had courmisch not made it in, it would have been 
Vittorio instead, right?
You're insinuating there was malice where instead there was an attempt 
of having more than five volunteers for a five places committee 
(Meaning, actually having a vote for it).

> 4. from the small number of people supporting the GA system origianlly
>     several changed their mind (both me and nicolas for example liked the
>     GA idea originally IIRC) also paul opposed it publically immedeatly
>     when it was announced many years ago

And why did you stop liking the idea? When i argued it was because one 
CC did not act as swiftly as you would have liked (or because you 
thought it was biased), you said that was not the case. So what changed 
your mind?

> 
> We can easily have something better

As it's been said before, proposing to change a system because you were 
not satisfied with the current one sets a bad precedent, and signals 
you're ok with a democratic system as long as it's to your liking, not 
as long as it's agreed by the people participating in it.
A change should be proposed if the system in question is proven to be 
flawed, which has not happened.

> 
> The community is thousands of people not just 49

How many times are you going to repeat this? Thousands of registered 
emails in a mailing list (of which a bunch are removed for excessive 
bouncing almost daily) is not thousands of people active in a community. 
Just look at these threads, and see how many different names are 
participating. It's not even 49, let alone thousands. You're heavily 
overestimating the amount of people that participate in the project.

Those 49 are people that have kept the project alive and progressing for 
at least the last five years. And if you think someone is missing from 
that list, why haven't you proposed them when we voted to have 
exceptions added?

Fwiw, as soon as we move to Forgejo/Gitlab, the amount of contributors 
should increase considerably, and next time the GA is formed by running 
the script, the composition will be very different.

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