Subject: Delibaration vs. voting (was: [GCD] Migrating repositories, issues, and patches to Codeberg)

From: Vagrant Cascadian <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 May 2025 09:43:54 -0700

On 2025-05-12, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Steve George <[email-masked]> writes:
>> Note that 'Deliberate' means to "consider or discuss", and a person
>> would "vote" at the end of a deliberation period to "to express your
>> choice or opinion".  That is the standard use in English. One doesn't
>> keep a "Deliberation" as a record of choices (e.g. tally of
>> votes). Also, to be explicit just because something is a "vote"
>> doesn't imply that the it's "majority rule" on anything similar. I
>> bring it up, because it's going to sounds odd to me as a native
>> English speaker.
>>
>> - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vote
>>
>> - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/deliberation
>
> Oh, I perhaps mistakenly assumed “deliberation” was the same as French
> “délibération”, “decision taken by a governing body”:
>
>   https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A9lib%C3%A9ration#Traductions
>   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A9lib%C3%A9ration
>
> Wiktionary seems to agree with the “decision taken” meaning, but WordNet
> (US English) less so.

To my take on english "deliberation" is usually focused more on the
process of making a decision, though possibly to make it clear and
explicit, we could use "deliberation results" or "results of the
deliberation" ?

> So now I’m not so sure but I still find the term “vote” to be loaded
> (and not what GCD 001 uses anyway).

I think that "vote" does tend to guide people towards other decision
making processes that are not really consensus building, if only for the
reason that many do not have much experience with anything other than
voting by majority rule... even if there are technically other meanings
for the word.

The term I am used to hearing instead of vote is "Call for consensus"
and then the result is nearly binary (e.g. consensus reached (with or
without abstentions), consensus not reached).

I find it is more important to record the issues and concerns that lead
to blocking consensus (e.g. "I disapprove") than to record who blocked
consensus. It gives a checklist of what needs to be fixed if something
similar is proposed later...

Without that, it is akin to those wonderful "Something went wrong" error
messages.

live well,
  vagrant