Transition away from email-based voting

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

Email-based voting for CA/Browser Forum guideline ballots has proven to be disruptive and less efficient than other alternatives. I propose amending Item 4 in Section 2.3 of the Bylaws ("General Provisions Applicable to All Ballots") to enable the use of the CABF Membership Tool or another suitable mechanism for vote collection. This transition would streamline the voting process and reduce operational friction.

The current language in Item 4 reads as follows:

"For ballots related to the Forum level, votes must be sent to the Public Mail List of the Forum. For ballots related to a CWG, votes must be sent to the Public Mail List of the CWG. All voting will take place via a Public Mail List. Votes must be submitted by a Voting Representative to the correct Public Mail List by the end of the voting period (as specified in the ballot) to be considered valid and counted."

To facilitate a transition to a more efficient voting mechanism, we could re-write Item 4 to say something like:

"Votes on ballots at the Forum level must be sent to the Public Mail List of the Forum, or when made available, submitted via a designated webpage specified by the Forum for vote collection. Votes on ballots within a CWG must be sent to the Public Mail List of the CWG, or when made available, submitted via a designated webpage specified by the CWG for vote collection. All voting will take place via the Public Mail List or the designated webpage specified for vote collection."

This proposal would retain our ability to use the current email-based system while paving the way for a more efficient voting platform.

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

Section 2.4 needs to be amended, too. It says, "For ballots related to the Forum level, votes must be sent to the Public Mail List of the Forum. For ballots related to a CWG, votes must be sent to the Public Mail List of the CWG. All voting will take place via the proper Public Mail List. Votes not submitted to the Public Mail List or not submitted by a Voting Representative, will not be considered valid, and will not be counted for any purpose."

[DeanJC]

As someone who has to do this voting compilation, I'm for the change.

[jospurvis]

Awesome to see this moving! A suggested change:

"Votes on ballots at the Forum level must be sent to the Public Mail List of the Forum, or when made available, submitted via a designated webpage specified by the Forum for vote collection. Votes on ballots within a CWG must be sent to the Public Mail List of the CWG, or when made available, submitted via a designated webpage specified by the CWG for vote collection. All voting will take place via the Public Mail List or the designated webpage specified for vote collection."

In all three cases here, I would modify "designated webpage" to "designated voting tool", to keep from painting ourselves into a corner again with regards to technology choices. :)

Also, I think we talked about not having the CWGs make their own choices on this — in that case, perhaps "...of the CWG, or when made available, submitted via the designated voting tool specified by the Forum for vote collection." Alternately, we could avoid breaking out the CWGs entirely with something like this:

All voting on ballots or other issues within the Forum or its CWGs shall take place via a voting tool designated by the Forum for vote collection or via the relevant Public Mail List. At the Forum level, email voting must use the Public Mail List of the Forum; voting on issues over email at the CWG level must use the CWG's Public Mail List.

(Maybe not simpler, but does have the advantage of allowing us to lop off everything after "...for vote collection" at some point in the future...)

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

We should narrow this to "Guidelines" ballots ("Other" ballots), because a different process is used for Officers - "Special Ballots".

Do we need to open another issue for designating all the different types/varieties of Ballots? See Issue #67

[BenWilson-Mozilla]

Dimitris wants to ensure transparency, and so submitting a vote should trigger an email to the mailing list with a certain subject tag that can be easily filtered out if people want to do that.