Voting and getting things done

[ant elder <an...@gmail.com>]

I thought it might be worthwhile commenting about voting in Apache projects.

There are times when you need to officially record a decision and you can do
that with a vote, for example, you can't make a release till there has been
a vote which needs at least three binding +1s for it to pass. Many other
times you need to make decisions but the formality and overhead of a vote
isn't necessary.

One approach with less overhead is to just go ahead and do something then
afterwards if necessary post to the dev list mentioning what you did, if
there are comments you can iterate around making changes till everyone is
happy. Another alternative is to use lazy consensus and say on the dev list
that you're planning on doing something in a few days if no one replies with
any comments or objections.

There are policies defining when a formal vote is mandatory,  when there is
no policy you need to make a judgement call, big changes that impact
multiple people probably should at least be mentioned first, less
significant changes you can probably just go right ahead and do. For most
things it can be quicker and easier not to have a vote.

   ...ant