My two cents on the voting system.
There is more than one side to a petition.
- dev side: is that feasible?
- user side (with a general understanding of the platform): do we want it?
- average joe that knows nothing of the platform but uses it: do I like this?
- core team: is there someone to work on it? And is that a breaking change?
And many more.
The votes can’t show really if a feature can be deemed worthy of inclusion because they don’t describe the whole situation.
What is more “logic” to me is that we use petitions as a “starting proposal”.
If a discussion arises on a petition, and there is a proposed solution, and someone is willing to put in the time to implement, and it checks all thecnical needs and is compliant to the rules and core team approves of it… Then we can present the petition as “open for voting” - where the votes serve only the purpose of deciding the priority (what order the petitions’ are implemented in core).
Because if we can “check all boxes and rules” it means it is something that sooner or later can get implemented. We just need to decide if it happens in a month or in a year.
Democracy works, when there are discerning rules at the very base of it. A system that works.
As of now petition aren’t really reflecting the community, since there are so very few people voting.
When the process was implemented the general idea was that it would grow fast and reach a critical mass of people/voters. That has not happened, just because we lack the mass marketing structure that permeates WP universe.
And the marketing effort we pushed through is indeed very big if we put the figures in perspective comparing with WP, but nevertheless we are smaller for now in terms of community size.
Obvious, it is better an healthy community than a tarnished ecosystem kept together with money, but the reality is we don’t have the numbers of voters needed to make petitions work as they were intended.
I basically think we have to reflect on our democracy system and update it to work with the real numbers, instead of working focusing on the numbers we may have “someday when everybody will flee from WP”.
It’s that the issue.
True, WP is a mob democracy. At first CP community was convinced that users will flee from WP in flocks. It hasn’t happened. Maybe it won’t happen. CP is just going to grow slowly biting away market share, probably we are going to erode the market share of those little realities that were struggling for their slice with WP at first, then we will be able to maybe notice WP shrinking.
All the petition system as it is now, is based on the premises that we are able to shrink WP by converting a lot of people to CP and it’s not happening the way it was first envisioned.
As @anon66243189 says, we need a set of rules to guide democracy, and I think tailoring these rules to what CP really is now is a very good move we can do.