“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

I've begged GitHub to institute forms of government for repos.

For X action to happen, Y percent of the pool of people in the Z list need to approve it.

Membership of the Z list is granted when W percent of the T pool approve it.

Modifying the rules of government of this repo can only happen when L percent of the R pool approve it.

And on and on...

I could imagine a city or state government actually having its laws encoded in Github, and Github itself enforces the governmental system of checks and balances. Congress. Senate. President. Veto. Overriding a Veto. Laws of succession. Elections. On and on.

Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo? Will there also be an option for pure democracy?

Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?

I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government. We already have checks and balances, if GitHub did it all who decides how GitHub works? What’s the benefit?

    > Why is representative democracy the best system for managing a repo?

The most obvious reason (to me) is that it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal. I've never even used Python. Should my vote be worth the same as Guido's when it comes to some technical decision? This is a problem in representative democracies as well, of course, but you've a little more protection.

There's also the issue of practicality. Voting on issues is a time and resource intensive process. It's just impractical to have everybody vote directly on every single decision.

    > Can I fork your socialist utopia and form an authoritarian dictatorship?

Well, of course!

    > I don’t see why this system would ever be beneficial to a real world government.

I can't think of a less viable equivalency than attempting to equate a system government to an open source project's management model.

- Nations have many orders of magnitude more resources than... Python

- Practically speaking the vast majority of people can belong to only a single nation, whereas most developers probably used a handful of languages in the last 24h

- Nobody asked to be born into a country, and most people on Earth can't simply choose a new one

- The decisions made by nations are literally life and death for millions of people

The relevant factors for determining the course of Python's governance model bear far more resemblance to your neighborhood restaurant's menu decisions than the ways in which governments are elected.

> it's sort of preposterous to think that all votes are equal.

Sorry if this wasn't clear, but I think there should be different classes of users, with different powers.

No, your vote should not have the same power as someone who has carefully maintained Python for years.

But if there are nine peers, maybe they would like a bit of automation to help them

1) triage bugs

2) vote on actions

3) take those actions automatically based on the result of voting

> It's just impractical to have everybody vote directly on every single decision.

Different parts of code could have different protections.

Want to update the docs? Go for it! If we hate your changes, we'll just revert them.

Want to change the implementation of memcpy? Uh, you're going to get lots of reviews.

> government

How should a city government keep track of its artifacts? The documents it produces that have the authority of their office? Revisions to those documents? Approval over those revisions?

I'm saying technology might make their jobs simpler.