Totally agree. Don’t have any ideas how this could be incorporated in the petition process, but I think this should be considered.
And so, a regular user with no dev skills has little chance of seeing his petition approved. Sad, but true.
And it’s even sadder because that would imply that “voice” is not enough.
Exactly. This is the intent of the wording on the Governance page:
Once you’ve made your suggestion it will be open to comment and initial voting by the community. Once a general direction is agreed by the community and the contributors to the core code, volunteers are also needed to move the suggestion forward in the form of an example plugin implementation or a GitHub pull request.
Otherwise, the petition can and should be implemented.
I don’t see this as sad.
Voice is important, because people here have great ideas that would not have occurred to me in 1000 years. But having an idea is not enough: we have to know if it’s feasible.
Whether the idea is feasible or not is important. There are many petitions that would be great to have but are simply out of scope for ClassicPress, because they would increase the code complexity and the support burden beyond any reasonable expectation of what we could take on today. But having a feasible idea is not enough: we need people to implement it.
Having people to implement the idea is important. This is what we are often stuck on today, but I have seen us starting to build a lot more momentum over the past few months. Still, just having developers who have the skill, experience and time to work on ClassicPress itself is not enough: we have to make sure that we are implementing features that users want, and that work well according to the broader direction and resources of the ClassicPress project.
In this way, all of these perspectives should inform each other, with who approves being a combination of petition creators, voting community members, and core committers. If we try to make changes without considering the perspective of all of those kinds of stakeholders then those changes will not be successful.
I’ve requested the ability to enable downvotes on the main Discourse forums: Discourse Topic Voting - #226 - plugin - Discourse Meta Please go over there and voice your support, that will make someone more likely to take notice.
I think it’s good that we are discussing how to make the petitions process better. Personally I think all the essential pieces are in place, and it’ll be good to clarify the rules we use to make decisions further.
It might be worth clarifying this process since community members appear to have different ideas about how it works (or should work).
@viktor recently wrote a very good blog article that covers most of it, so I will quote from that.
First…
Anyone can create a petition to make a change to ClassicPress, be it a new feature in the core, removal of a feature, or changes to an existing feature. Once petitions are created, anyone in the community can vote and start a discussion about the petition.
Fair enough. But then note…
There is no specific voting threshold that would automatically warrant petitions for inclusion in ClassicPress core. Instead, we review petitions based on their merits, alignment with the overall direction of the ClassicPress project, and whether or not the petitioner or other community members are able to provide help developing the feature.
So there is no threshhold number that needs to be reached in order for a petition to be accepted/approved/actioned. The only concern for me here is “we review petitions”… who is “we” and how does this review process work?
Then there are various steps or stages outlined. This one should also be noted…
Research Plugin or Pull Request – once someone decides to work on the petition they can either start working using a research plugin (for complex features) or submit a pull request directly to the ClassicPress core repository (for small, simple features and fixes).
So once someone decides to work on a petition they can submit a PR. This doesn’t necessarily mean the petition has been accepted or approved. A PR can be rejected or withdrawn at any stage.
I think the process is basically workable as is. I actually consider petitions to be more like “talking points” now. But I would like to a see a little more clarity around how petitions are reviewed, who reviews them and what they use as their criteria.
My attempt at answering this question is above:
It is just an attempt… hopefully that reasoning makes some sense from the perspective of a maintainer.
I read through the thread on discourse, and I understand the general view on not having a down vote thumb etc. So discourse is not going to implement this.
To me the petitions for classic press should have 3 options + , - , and a neutral. With the request that everybody that reads the petition should vote.
This would give a much better representation for the petition. As in 10+ votes is good if ten people read the post. But if 500 people read the post 10+ is not so positive. And there might even be more than 10 potential “do not like” votes that will never be expressed using current the method.
Yeah, I seem to have misunderstood the thread as a quest about how our petitions process and admission process works, and how to improve it, which seems not to be the direct goal of the thread.
About perfection being subjective… that is indeed subjective, I mean, the understanding of wether it is subjective or not 
However, IMO, and in the opinion of many others, perfection is indeed not subjective:
Perfection: the action or process of improving something until it is faultless or as faultless as possible.
That is not subjective - however the faults might be.
Let me make an example that should clarify my point of view:
There is a thing we use in sailing, I believe in EN it is called the “telltales”
It is a tiny “rope” attached to the sail (see image of it here)
This telltale will tell you wether you “stand in the wind” perfectly or not.
Now, it is not possible to achieve the perfection one strives for in this case (and probably in all other cases), but it is possible to strive for it
Basically, in the sailing example, you look at the telltale and strive to have the telltale as horizontal and as straight and as non-flattering as possible.
If the telltale is hanging down, or standing upwards, you are either to low or to hard in the wind.
There is that moment where a telltale will indeed be in the perfect position and have the perfect quality you strive for - and immediately lose it again because the wind is not a constant, it is a variable, and thus you have to constantly adjust to strive for the perfection you seek.
On this perfection, there is nothing subjective. It is a mathematical fact that if the telltale stands (as much as possible) perfectly, then your boat will take the most out of the wind, with the least room for energy waste or “error”.
There is something similar in an airplane wing shape, or the exit angle of a rocket from earths orbit. Perfection exists. It is discoverable, the question is, do we know the perfect state of something, or not.
This perfection also exists in an entire CMS or in a simple link - we just have to discover it (by breaking it down into its parts and what they shall perform and how), if we do not yet know it.
When we know if, there won’t be a subjective room for interpretation because we will have discovered the perfect state of a CMS.
Well, until we discover that, we can say it is my subjective opinion that perfect state exists in all things existing, we just need to discover it, similar to we discover the laws of physics and until we don’t, it is a subjective belief and approach, until we found the objective “truth”
PS: probably this and my previous post should be split outside of this thread
For a complex entity that is used in different ways by different people (such as a CMS), this is never possible. Perfection is entirely in the eye of the beholder and is therefore completely subjective.
I’ve read the responses in your request, and it seems to me that it’s already a NO.
Voting is an official plugin that we maintain so it isn’t likely to be added to that anytime soon. ~HAWK
To me the question of “who approves” is intimately related to the overall improvement of the petition process.
I agree the example applies to building a CMS. There may not be one single indicator but I would “know it when we see it” - and it would look like all of the perspectives I described above converging in agreement on what to do or how to execute a given change.
As far as downvotes, after sleeping on it, I agree with the point of the Discourse team that it actually makes discussion more contentious and more difficult, and I still don’t see that as an essential component of the process. I stand by the recommendation to leave a comment explaining why you don’t like a given petition - this is always going to be much better than just impersonally saying “no” - and we will take that feedback into account for all petitions.
Yes, I agree. In fact, since there is no threshold for upvotes to make a difference, I guess you could argue that upvotes aren’t an essential component either. But they do give a quick indication of interest level. As I’ve said before, a petition is mainly a conversation starter.
The links above regarding downvotes in Discourse will be deleted eventually, so I’ll link to something more definitive from the Discourse team. They have studied this issue pretty thoroughly and they have been building this kind of software for a long time.
I will also close this thread now, since it got a bit off-topic.