Oh sure, why do we need to consider pesky things like arguments? Just sheepishly vote with the group so we can go to eat, sleep or whatever faster, who cares whether Fedora will suffer from the decisions we rushed due to our laziness? We've had the "shut up now, we want to move on" move enough already, now we're going to formalize it instead of banning this undemocratic behavior? What the f***? Should FESCo really be a committee of lazy bureaucrats rushing through decisions with little to no discussion, completely ignoring the cons? There are proposals being made up as a (complete over)reaction to some current event and immediately rushed to a vote (with no feedback from anybody, why even bother asking the devel mailing list, they surrendered all their rights to us FESCo oligarchs by the act of voting, so screw them all), nobody ever bothers evaluating the cons before hitting those +, 1 and ENTER keys (or even before bringing up the proposal in a meeting in the first place) and OF COURSE the "solution" to this just HAS to be banning people from even bringing up those cons. What a wonderful idea! And yes, let's justify all this by the fact that real politics work the same way, because hypocritical corrupt politicians are the perfect example to follow.

(Note: There's obviously a lot of bitter sarcasm in the above.)

Needless to say, I vote -1 to this proposal. It kills democracy.

This is not to remove reasonable discussion it is to close down discussion when a decision needs to be made. Arguing when no one is being convinced is not worthwhile it just takes up time and causes anger and hurt feelings to no benefit.

Fesco is of elected representatives. If the voters do not agree with this rule then they can vote out those who vote in favor of it.

I am in favor of it. If that causes me to voted out at a later date, that's fine.

+1

This is not to remove reasonable discussion it is to close down discussion when a
decision needs to be made.

But in pretty much all cases, the decision does not NEED to be made right away, it can wait a few minutes for the discussion to complete, or even for the next meeting. It's you who WANT to make it because you don't want to listen to the discussion. Maybe because it makes you feel bad that you're entirely ignoring the arguments being brought up?

Fesco is of elected representatives. If the voters do not agree with this rule
then they can vote out those who vote in favor of it.

This system may be nice in theory, but it never works in practice. Never did, never will. Politics are the perfect example of how this is just not working. The frequent abuse of power by some politicians is NOT a good example to follow! It is our job as representatives to REPRESENT (as the word "REPRESENTatives" says) the people who elected us, not to say "they voted me, now I get to do whatever I want".

I have two problems with this:

1) The specification of how we'd use this is insufficient. Is the 2/3 vote a vote /instead/ of voting on the subject at hand? If so, how's it different from merely voting against whatever proposal is on the table? Why a 2/3 vote when we only require a simple majority to ratify (or block) a proposal?
2) We already have sufficient mechanisms to move on to another subject, such as telling the bot to move to the next subject once we've voted. We're not particularly good at using them, but we should try that avenue before affecting more process.

So far I'm -1 here, simply because I don't see how such a poorly defined process change can possibly help with anything.

We routinely have a hard time getting to a vote b/c the argument keeps going round and round with no end in sight. If not having a cloture rule then we should have a rule that says once a vote begins that discussion ends on the subject so we don't end up with neverending discussion.

That's the goal I have here, to make it so fesco meetings are hours long with simply rehashed discussion.

We can already do that - if we simply tally the vote, and when 5 people have voted, tell the bot the response and tell it to move on.

We have a mechanism which works fine, we simply often don't use it.

That shows that the real problem is that the folks vote even before discussion starts. (I know, I've done it too, I never claimed I was perfect!) We should have separate discussion and voting phases and only start taking votes after the discussion is over. That would allow for well-thought-out votes weighing the pros and cons in the discussion (though of course it'll depend on each of us whether they'll actually vote like that) instead of the preconceived summary judgements and the "I've voted already, now leave me alone" attitude we're seeing now.

If we want to have a formal discussion period, time-limited followed by a voting period, I'm fine with that, provided the discussion time limit is not forever.

Nirik? Any thoughts on that?

Well, the problem with a time limit is that some subjects will take longer than others. How are we to estimate a time limit for each topic?

I suppose we could have a hard limit (like 15minutes) on any topic and have a majority vote to continue discussion past that?

Otherwise I am unsure how to estimate the time limit for any given discussion...

I think the time limit should be shorter for routine items such as features or provenpackager/sponsor requests than for e.g. policy changes.

And I wonder whether it's really a good idea to have FESCo be directly responsible for those routine items as we are now or whether we should consider delegating them to some subcommittee or individual. But I have no set opinion on that. I just notice that they take up a significant proportion of our meetings, leaving little time to other, arguably more important topics.

While fesco thinks fun should be kept in mind and contibuting to fedora be fun, we can't codify this.

Argh. Misfire. ;)

We have decided to set a 15min limit per topic with a majority vote to continue discussion.