It is true that I took some risks by not running the exact wording by the discussants and the responsibility for any potential bias in the wording is mine. It would be useful for me and likely for others if you could point out where do you believe my vote text is not faithful to the conversation or provide an alternative (so that others could decide it they would vote differently if your wording was chosen). I think it is important that community members are open about their frustrations and thanks for voicing yours. However I don’t think that I didn’t “appeal for feedback” or that I somehow circumvented the main discussants.
To give receipts: on Dec 5th (17 days before the vote) I first posted that I believe vote is the appropriate next step, provided my understanding of the remaining disagreement and outlined the main features of the vote (you were quoted in the post so I believe you must have been notified about it). This was approved by @mans_magnusson on Dec 15th. I reiterated my intentions on Dec 18th (4 days before the vote) and explicitly asked people to let me know if they want to collaborate on the wording. I got one reaction in private which was roughly “the discussion/voting process is too slow and cumbersome” and described the outline of the vote as favoring rejection of posteriordb. Over this time frame, I didn’t get any reaction from you or an indication that you plan to react.
So I see a few possible complaints underlying your general statement:
- The final wording differs in an important way from my Dec 5th outline - if so, could you clarify what do you believe should be worded differently?
- I didn’t seek feedback vehemently enough (e.g. I didn’t remind you via a personal message). Putting some extra effort into getting feedback from people most likely to disagree is something I often try to do and consider best practice. I admit I have fallen somewhat short of my own standards here.
- Similarly to the previous point, I should have explicitly encouraged people to let me know if they want to react, but require more time to compose their thougths. Posting something like “Hey, I need X more time, please don’t close the discussion yet” is also something I would consider good practice in general and I think should be encouraged whenever possible.
Is any of those what you had in mind? Or am I misunderstanding something?
How to move forward?
As described in the voting procedure, the start of the vote does not mean an end to discussion and if people are convinced by Mike’s arguments or are on the fence and belive further discussion to be useful or just don’t like the process so far, I encourage them to change their vote to “Don’t include” unless their concerns are addressed. If anybody is concerned, but does not for any reason want to state their concerns publicly, please reach out to other community member you trust or to any member of the SGB to voice the concern (or simply note the presence of some concerns) on your behalf. I promise to take any such concerns seriously. There is also the option to seek formal arbitration on the voting process with the SGB.
It was my goal to represent this as the main disagreement in the vote: posteriordb devs believe the same goals are sufficiently precise for the time being and I assume people voting for option 1 agree. Do you believe my wording does not make this clear? I encourage anybody who agrees with Mike that the goals are ambiguous and should be refined prior to promoting posteriordb to choose option 2 or 3 in the vote.
My understanding is that the posteriordb devs (and likely others) consider most/all of your technical points valid and worthy of consideration in further development, but disagree that they need to be addressed before posteriordb can be promoted.
P.S.: Can someone who is not an admin/mod try to change their vote? The system let’s me change mine, but I am not 100% sure it works for non-privileged users (somewhat unintuitively you need to click the “Show vote” button to change your vote).