On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 1:18 PM Lukas Ruzicka <lruzicka@redhat.com> wrote:

Abstain is useful if there are conflicts of interest, or to indicate no preference either way, or as a result of confusion. I chock up more than one abstain vote as an indicator the proposal isn't persuasive enough. Indeed if everyone votes to abstain, that means the vote was premature/ill advised and that the arguments in favor and against must be improved, rather than literally do nothing.


Generally speaking yes, however deciding whether something is a blocking bug (or not) will probably not fall into the category of premature or ill advised votes. I assume that the vote will only take place when there will have been at least some discussion about the problem, so people will probably not arrive into a situation when "they would not know much about it". 

Also, I assume that the common group of people who regularly attend the blocker bug meeting are interested in casting the vote actually, so if they do not, you could take it as a sign that the vote is not clear enough.

I am perhaps projecting something, but I usually do not understand people who give up on their vote by placing an empty envelope in general elections to show that they really do not see a difference between the two final presidential candidates. I just believe they simply have not been investigating enough. I think also believe that throwing an empty envelope can be a sign that they do not want to take the responsibility to decide. However, since it is legal in the Czech republic, I live with that.

The same holds true here, if people say that they want to be able to cast a "0" for whatever reason, and we make it a legal choice, I will be fine with that. Basically, to have or not to have a "zero" option in voting is totally unimportant, when there are voices against asynchronous meetings. So let's not waste time in arguments about the "immortality of the cockchafer" as one of the Czech sayings says.

Let's just say we have a long history of +0 votes in our IRC meetings, and they are quite frequent. I don't intend to change that in the async blocker process proposal. As you say, "it's totally unimportant", primarily because it doesn't affect the vote result.