Add some guidelines about abtaining vote in case of absence

[damianavila]

A discussion was started by @afshin about delegating/abstaining a vote in his absence.

Suggestion from @Ruv7 was:

I didn't do a ton of research (see attached questions to consider) but due to the timing what I believe would be a simpler approach would be for you to abstain from urgent voting during the specified time periods.

@afshin and several following the thread agreed. We should formalize this idea and include it in the governance document.

[choldgraf]

I think it's a good idea to provide a mechanism for people to "not vote". FWIW here's the section that has language about abstaining: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0013/#powers

[Ruv7]

@damianavila - to confirm we're on the same page, are you proposing an amendment of the current bylaws?

[damianavila]

@damianavila - to confirm we're on the same page, are you proposing an amendment of the current bylaws?

Yep.

[Ruv7]

@damianavila apologies for the long delay here, November has somehow slipped away. There are two things to discuss, one is voting by proxy and the other is abstentions from a particular vote. As a best practice I would advise we stay away from allowing proxy votes. By default, because they're not explicitly allowed, I believe they are implicitly not allowed so I think the current bylaws are ok. We could spend some time making it more clear by specifically including language barring proxies but it's unclear to me if that would be of enough value to merit a vote. The second thing is abstaining from votes. I do think some work could be done on the language there. In practice explicitly abstaining favors the majority vote (whether that's a yes or a no) and simply not responding is essentially a no or con vote. We can't force folks to vote on a particular thing but we could set some guidelines for active participation, what sort of language or guidelines were you thinking of? I'm happy to provide feedback or to collaborate on this just let me know which direction you were thinking of going with it.

[damianavila]

In the above link referenced above (the Python process) there is an interesting line:

"Every council member must either vote or explicitly abstain."

I think this is something interesting to adopt, as you said, we can not "force" folks to vote on a particular thing, but we (may?|should?) "force" them to take an action, even when that action is just the abstention? One of the responsibilities of an SC member is actually voting on these things, right?

Thoughts welcome.

[choldgraf]

hey all - just wanted to share that many of these conversations are also happening in the weekly governance refactoring meetings (https://discourse.jupyter.org/c/governance). It's more applicable to a "future" governing body as opposed to the current SC, but I think many of the same topics such as voting and expectations around it, still apply. I'll link to this thread in the meeting notes and also want to note it'd be great to hear your thoughts in one of the weekly governance meetings!