[cabfpub] [EXTERNAL]Re: ]RE: Ballot 194 - Effective Date of Ballot 193 Provisions is in the VOTING period (ends April 16)

[Gervase Markham]

On 17/04/17 06:29, Kirk Hall via Public wrote:
> OK, to move this along (and avoid endless back and forth that won’t
> resolve anything), I have created a Doodle poll on whether or not
> Microsoft’s vote on Ballot 194 should be counted.  One vote per member
> please, only members to vote. 

Hi Kirk,

While I appreciate your desire to resolve this situation, it seems that
we have now moved way beyond our bylaws. Nowhere does it say that
disputes over the meaning of the bylaws shall be resolved by a straw poll.

If we are unable to reach agreement on what our bylaws mean, we need to
amend the bylaws and retry the controversial action. There is precedent
for this - it's what we did when there were bylaw-related queries as
part of the big IPR policy reset (which is why it took even longer than
expected). We fixed the bylaws, then we used the fixed bylaws to
re-conduct our IPR process under the IPR policy.

The fact that ballot 194 is time-sensitive is unfortunate, but is not a
relevant fact in determining how we proceed from here.

There is no need to amend the bylaws to fix the problem before any
revote on ballot 194 (under a new ballot number) because we hit an edge
case this time which we are unlikely to hit again now everyone is aware
of it. So I propose we do two things in parallel:

1) Restart the voting process for ballot 194 under a different number

2) Draft a ballot to fix the Bylaws to be clear that only votes made
public via the Public Mailing list are counted. (I would say "appears in
the public archives" is a good proxy for "made public" while being
objectively measurable.)

Gerv