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by cyphar 2739 days ago
In Westminster-style democracies, party members elect their party's leader (the general public don't get to decide who the leader of a particular party is).

In America, you can only vote in primaries (that is, choose presidential and other candidates) if you are a registered voter of that party -- which means that it's also restricted to a subset of the public.

So I'm not sure I agree it is a mismatch to most democracies. Obviously there is a difference, but it's still clearly democratic in spirit (and actually matches how some real democracies work in some aspects).
2 comments
sciurus 2739 days ago
Nitpick, but like many things in America that varies from state to state. Many have "open primaries" where you just show up and request whichever party's ballot you want.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United...

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kibwen 2739 days ago
I'd say this looks to be conflating "voting" with democracy-in-spirit. The OP mentions that about 90 people participated in this vote, which is less than a slim fraction of Python's hundreds of thousands of users. This isn't analogous to a representative democracy, because that would imply some sort of election to appoint the "representatives", which wasn't the case.

I'm not particularly interested in arguing about what democracy "is" (we'll be here all day, and then some), but I think it's clear that this model is what democracy "isn't". And I'm not saying that's a bad thing (certainly different styles of governance are suitable for different contexts).

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cyphar 2739 days ago
I would argue that the people most impacted by the steering committee's decisions would be the core team -- who are the people that voted, and thus the steering committee model represents the will of the core team.

Obviously users will be impacted, but in such a tangential way that I would argue that it'd be more like how other countries are impacted by the decisions of a democratic country's leadership (and you wouldn't argue that Canadians should have the right to vote in American presidential elections). Just like the Linux CoC, I don't understand why people who don't contribute to the project should be involved in how the project's development is run.

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