What does it mean if not all members vote?

@Sean: The bad will, if there was any bad will in the dev community (from what I witnessed out on the stream) had to do with a lack of communication. You know this. People were hurting not because they were flooding all these tools. They were upset and confused not because there were not enough teams. They were upset and confused because:

1. there was no ONE place to air their concerns.
2. If they did air them, they were dismissed or ignored.
3. and everyone saw this behavior, so why bother to participate in that?

This has compounded.

IMO, a lot of this could have been cured by just having clear links to these forums and stating at the location of the link on the main JD site where to go and who to contact if there was any confusion. No one lead the stream of discourse, and so it ended up instead out on the stream! :)

I personally have felt left to my own devices and then been treated in not such a friendly way for making contributions that I made in good will. I even was willing to dive into IRC, which I find terribly problematic, especially for ordinary users.

I don't want to go over further into the history for fear of causing more bad will, but I don't think I can accept what you are saying as the reason for the breakdown in community is because people had bad ideas and didn't understand what development means or because of mindless complaining. I don't think that is giving people a lot of credit.

In response to all the tools used, that is exactly to what I've said all along. Throwing tools at the problem isn't working. Having a clear message about what Diaspora will help alleviate a lot of the stress here.

To be fair, I recognize that the core devs have been through an unusual journey, and I know it hasn't been easy. I am very sympathetic to it actually. There are a lot of people who want to see the vision materialize. That is if the original vision is still on the table. I think now people want to know what that vision is. We are all waiting to hear it to know if we want to participate or not. You can't blame us for that.

So this is why I'm a broken record. Define the objective of what this community is. Allow people to respond to it and see what shakes out from it. You might actually be pleasantly surprised what comes up to the surface. :)

or you might not! ;) such is the risks of FOSS right?

I don't mean to go off-topic, but... on my screen the current proposal on the right is "Should we have a minimum length of time for proposals?", but this discussion is for "What does it mean if not all members vote?". Does anyone else have that mismatch??

That's not a bug. One is a discussion, the other is an active proposal in the governance subgroup.