I guess I should chime in here as I did in the council hackfest thread.
While I cannot say much new, I must record my opinion. I think this will end up hurting ourselves as a community. Limiting participation without a relevant precedent does not make sense.
I thought the Fedora strategy 2028[1] goal was “By the end of 2028, double the number of contributors active every week.”. This in my honest opinion goes in the opposite direction, it is not welcoming and it just gatekeeping people.
If you contributed a lot until Fedora 30 and for whatever reason stop, maybe an election gets you again in the loop. With the new approach - well, you cannot vote anymore so why do you even care about the elections? Why do you even care about what is going on in Fedora, anyway if you don’t like it you won’t be able to chime in!
In addition, all the arguments around this seems to be empty to me for mainly 2 reasons:
- All are based on assumptions that the elections will be rigged by people out of the system.
- This is mixing concepts. Above the xz utils situation was mentioned. Well, if the same approach to the xz utils would be taken on Fedora with the new system.. it would have succeeded! The attacked was a known name around the project not just a random person showing up. So how is that even related to this change?
Anyway, do we even have the tools to understand how will this impact the community engagement?
Finally I would like to share a personal experience not an argument[2]. I joined Fedora for first time because I wanted to vote for someone. Then I discovered plenty of new things and ways to participate and people encouraged me to do it. If I would have found such gate keeping I would not have bothered to get started.
P.S: Sorry if something that I mentioned was already addressed on the discussion. I tried to read everything but could have overlook something.