0006: Amendments to PMCR-0003 name selection process

Summary

The final decision-making process from PMCR-0003 has made it considerably hard to reach a final agreement. This new PMCR aims to amend that process and reduce the follow-up effort required for changing the name.

Motivation

The name-change selection process stated the following in its point 4:

Ensure that everybody within the team is fine with the name that won the vote. If somebody is really unhappy with the name, we schedule a meeting where we discuss our options, try to understand the reasons, and figure out if we want to look for alternatives. As we already have the ranked list from the voting, this should be much faster than if we just started with a discussion without prior vote.

Unfortunately, we had not established good criteria for name selection, and some of the names in the list had different problems. By listening to every person individually, and then trying to make a decision against their will, we increased the chances of a potential conflict. In addition, we did not establish what we would have considered the requirements for a good name, creating further confusion in the decision-making process. The ranked-choice voting process also did not allow people to express things like “love” or “dislike” to specific names.

Finally, that paragraph in the original PMCR established the expectation that everybody would have to feel good about the new name for the change to be made. This is unrealistic. In a big, diverse group of people, with something socially complex as the emotional relationship that different people might have with the name, it results impossible to have everybody pleased. This applies not only here, but to every hard decision we will take in the future. We can no longer work exclusively based on consensus. And democratic decisions mean some people might not be pleased by some decisions. The PMCR should serve as a process to collectively work out how to take decisions in the best way, alienating the least amount of people. Not to seek an impossible-to-reach consensus.

Consequences

By amending the process:

  • We will be able to select a name avoiding hard-feelings and conflict.

  • We can collectively write-down the attributes that we expect from the new name, and make sure that whatever name we choose is “good”.

  • We avoid introducing unnecessary overhead for developers by avoiding changes to non-user-facing components.

Implementation plan

Before this PMCR is ready to vote

Name requirements

  • Easy to pronounce in as many languages as possible. As a consequence, the name must be short and ideally maximum 4 syllables.

  • Has a straight-forward capitalization.

  • Should be trademarkable. As a consequence, no OS at the end, and likely neither Linux.

  • Avoids problematic connotations in some part of the world.

  • It’s generic enough that does not limit the meaning of the project (like postmarketOS or Pocket).

  • Allows retaining the logo or a modification of it.

  • Having some continuity from “postmarketOS”. Be it in the spelling, its relationship with sustainability, or any other possible creative way.

Selection group

The pmOS team will select a group of 3 to 5 people responsible for matching and triaging the names against the requirements. In case more than 5 people are chosen, diversity criteria should be taken into consideration for a final decision. Example of such criteria:

  • Someone from outside the team/project, maybe only loosely familiar with what we do (and would learn more about what we do by being in the group).

  • A native English speaker.

  • A non-native English speaker from outside EU (e.g. Asia, Africa, S. America).

  • People from multiple generations.

Candidates:

  • Pablo Correa Gomez (@pabloyoyoista)

  • Ranny Bergamotte (@RannyBergamotte)

  • Pan Ortiz (@panpanpanpan)

  • Sriram Ramkrishna (@sramkrishna)

After the PMCR is approved

Selecting potential names

Once this PMCR is approved, the “selection group” will triage the list of ~270 names we have from the community input. They will evaluate the list of names against the criteria, do research on different alternatives, and document their pros and cons, as well as why names might have been discard. The “selection group” might also consider alternative names not part of the initial list, at their discretion. They should document them as any other name on the list. They might consult external people, and have a 3-month deadline for the triaging of the names. The “selection group” should report to the Team Meetings on their progress. The deadline may be extended as many times as required upon approval in a Team Meeting.

Anybody might reach out to anybody in the selection group anytime to request adding a name to the list for consideration. The selection group might or might not consider more names depending on their own judgement and quality of already triaged names.

The selection group might weight the different name requirements according to their best judgement, as it might not always be possible to fit all the possible criteria, or the names available might be too few.

At the end of the process, the “selection group” will come up with a list of maximum 10 names, and ideally down to 3 names for the pmOS team to vote on.

Deciding on the name

Once “selection group” presents the names to the pmOS team, there shall be at the very least one week for the names to sink in, an another week for a vote to happen.

The voting will be done using range voting (also known as score voting) with a minimum of 5 scores (number of score might vary depending on the platform). This allows everybody to express how much they like each name. If the winner name average score is below the mean of the different score values, the name “postmarketOS” shall be kept. No other attempt to change the name shall be attempted until at least a year has passed.

For example:

  • If the scores are [-2, -1, 0, 1, 2], then the winner average must score over 0 to be accepted.

  • If the scores are integers from 1 to 10, then the winner average must score over 5 to be accepted.

Unless a voting platform that allows for range voting is available before the vote, the voting will be done through Nextcloud forms, where every name will be a question where only one of the scores will be able to be selected. To anonymise the results, randomly-generated codes will be sent to every pmOS team member, and will be asked as part of the questions.

Changing the name

Compared to the process established in PMCR-0003 this new plan does not necessarily consider postmarketos to be a legacy name. postmarketOS is what has brought us here. It is part of our history, and it might be fine to continue using this name in our community of hackers. Therefore, this PMCR is only concerned about name uses related to user-facing applications. Abbreviations and developer-facing tools may continue to use the old name, or change the name given that they do so in backwards-compatible way, e.g: having symlinks when required. This can be decided after a new name is chosen, or based on feedback from the wider community.

The following actions should be taken, with no other specific ordering than the first 2 have to be done first.

  1. Before going public, buy associated domain(s) (newname.org), and rename or get associated social media account(s) (@newname in mastodon, and r/ in lemmy). Handles at other popular social media sites might be claimed to avoid impersonation, at the discretion of the social media team.

  2. Make it public, with a rationale on the decision

  3. Rename repository names for websites and rebrand them to remove user-facing mentions to the old name:

    1. postmarketos.org -> newname.org

    2. build.postmarketos.org -> build.newname.org

    3. Wiki branding

    4. pkgs.postmarketos.org -> pkgs.newname.org

  4. (Concurrently to point above) Infra changes

    1. Point new domains (newname.org) to our websites

    2. Create automatic redirects for old names (postmarketos.org will redirect to newname.org)

    3. Keep a “postmarketos” link in the repository so that http://mirror.postmarketos.org/postmarketos/main and http://mirror.newname.org/postmarketos/main continue working.

    4. Add new aliases for matrix rooms and move IRC channels

    5. Rename gitlab group and repositories with the name

    6. Create email aliases for everybody

  5. pmaports changes

    1. Rename postmarketos- packages to newname-, including replaces and provides for the old names.

  6. Do a blog post as retrospective

  7. As a follow-up, slowly transition all instances of the name in our repositories from postmarketOS to newname

Most remarkably, compared to the old implementation we will not rename pmaports, bpo, and pmbootstrap or their include paths (pmb library) to avoid backwards-incompatible changes.

Mascot decision

Thanks to PastelSolitude who is making a mascot, we have several possible designs to choose from.

  • Along with the name vote, a poll will with different mascot designs will be put out along with any feedback. The selection group will collect the data.

  • Once a name has been decided and domains registered, will share with the artist.

  • Upon discussion between the artist and selection group representing the postmarketOS team, a final mascot selection will be made.

Note: there is no deadline or dependency to have a finished final version of the mascot before the name announcement.

The proposers

Pablo Correa Gomez, Core Contributors member and author of PMCR-0003.

Clayton Craft, Core Contributors member and initial author of the idea for the selection committee.