Just remove the community from an open source community and things will start happening FAST.
Since, most people reading this thread are truly influential can't you guys talk with canonical and fork Debian under the Ubuntu project? You could model a community around how HN runs and vote things organically into existence while keeping a high level of quality. Instead of a rant match between a bunch of egos.
If you think about it the HN model is perfect for such stuff. If and only if you attract the right audience, but your work already reaches them!
Have you ever considered doing that? Or is there something wrong in my suggestion?
Have you seen how many packages there are in Debian/Ubuntu and how many Debian Developers there are? Forking Ubuntu entirely away from Debian would be a massive task and would need a huge injection of skilled people.
(Also internet voting for things leads to a system that encourages gaming the votes, see digg ;)
What I meant was inviting the best of those Debian devs to start afresh with the same code and create something even better under a new system.
You could always make voting tiered and restricted like stack overflow to avoid this... Moreover, if you attract just the right kind of people then the community will start moderating itself and keep the fluff at bay.
what are you trying to achieve with the voting? and what is the incentive for volunteers to put hours into packaging work if they're being motivated by votes rather than their personal interests?
A real democratic community where muscle flexing doesn't work and people can't exclude PHP from a package because it is "impure". If their big idea gets accepted they can collaborate with others to make it.
Just remove the community from an open source community and things will start happening FAST.
Since, most people reading this thread are truly influential can't you guys talk with canonical and fork Debian under the Ubuntu project? You could model a community around how HN runs and vote things organically into existence while keeping a high level of quality. Instead of a rant match between a bunch of egos.
If you think about it the HN model is perfect for such stuff. If and only if you attract the right audience, but your work already reaches them!
Have you ever considered doing that? Or is there something wrong in my suggestion?