There have been a number of flags raised around the first committer elections for the board, and the proposed election process for "committer seats" and the chair of the TSC. The goal of this page is to draft an alternate proposal, which will cover guidelines for running elections and proposed by-laws changes to be considered and voted by the board.

Some of the concerns which have been raised are:

• Lack of transparency in the election process
  • Candidate statements were sent initially only to voters
  • Details of the results of the votes are not published
• Error-prone process for electorate
  • Some duplicates/old emails in INFO files
  • Project maintainers need to update the INFO files, create repos after project approval
• Is "committer" the right level of contribution for voting?
  • OPNFV is not a code-driven project: wiki edits, upstream participation, Gerrit reviews, blueprints submission, presentations and event organisation are valuable participation
  • "Committer" status was handed out as a very low bar at project approval, many inactive "committers" across the many OPNFV projects
• Need to increase clarity around the election process
  • The elections "snuck up" on people - seemed quite rushed in terms of process, no clear understanding of what was driving the urgency
  • One potential candidate missed the TSC chair proposal deadline because of a US holiday weekend
  • No "hustings" or questions to candidates - election fundamentally is a popularity contest in the absence of debate
  • See earlier concerns about where election materials were sent - the lack of a documented process has led to some confusion and discontent
• Concerns about TSC being made up of nominees of Platinum sponsors, instead of active technical contributors to the project

I propose adopting the following processes for member board elections:

• "Individual committer member" to be modified to "Active Technical Contributor", a status to be defined by the board and the TSC, based on active contributions to the project.
• The level of contributions should be objective, and measurable - automated where possible.
• Criteria could include (in each case, "in last 12 months" to ensure active contribution):
  • Git commits (1 commit, same as OpenStack)
  • Gerrit reviews (5 Gerrit reviews)
  • Wiki page edits (25 wiki page edits)
  • Blueprints submitted to upstream projects (primary submitter of 1 blueprint)
  • OPNFV User Group co-ordination (at least one OPNFV User Group meeting organized)
  • Membership of any board or TSC committee (marketing, strategic planning, board, TSC, C&C)
  • Project maintainer
• Other potential criteria could be:
  • Patches submitted to upstream project on an OPNFV blueprint (hard to measure)
  • Attendance at weekly technical call (hard to measure)
  • Project committer (tricky, because relies on maintainers to maintain good "active contributor/committer" lists)
  • Pharos lab administrator
  • Project ambassador - speaking about OPNFV in an event, or representing the project to the press

OPNFV is a "mid-stream" project - many of the most beneficial activities in our community are not source code related (or, at least, not in the OPNFV project), so this is the wrong metric to use. In addition, different projects have different bars for commit access, or do not maintain the committer lists with the same dilligence, and I would expect voting rights to be set to some objective level of participation. Using the committer lists also puts the burden of maintaining the voting list to project maintainers (via the INFO files) and as the number of maintainers grows with the number of projects, the risk of disenfranchising community members by omission grows.

We will soon have community metrics we can use to measure participation in other areas, and we should use these to define voting rights.

For all OPNFV community elections full (anonymized) results are published to allow independent verification of the results.

• Elections are announced on the 1st of September, or the date of the first TSC meeting after September 1st, on the opnfv-tech-discuss mailing list.
  • At this time the list of eligible voters, who are also eligible to be candidates, will be published to the OPNFV web-site allowing one week for errors and omissions to be corrected.
• The nomination period will begin one week after announcing the election and will continue for one week, until 14 days after the election announcement. Nominations of candidates can be made either as self-nominations, or by any candidate on their behalf although the nomination must be accepted by the nominee to be valid.
• The list of valid nominees will be announced on opnfv-tech-discuss at the end of the nomination period and posted to the community wiki. One week will be allowed for community debate and discussion.
• Polls will be open for one week, from the 21st day after announcing the election until the 28th day at which point results will be sent to opnfv-tech-discuss and posted on the wiki.

(this is according to current bylaws and aligned with the proposed process, assuming we would aim at the same election cadence even if we don't start there.)

• Elections are announced on the 1st of September, or the date of the first TSC meeting after September 1st, on the opnfv-tech-discuss mailing list.
  • At this time the list of eligible voters, who are also eligible to be candidates, will be published to the OPNFV web-site allowing one week for errors and omissions to be corrected.
• The nomination period will begin one week after announcing the election and will continue for one week, until 14 days after the election announcement. Nominations of candidates can be made either as self-nominations, or by any candidate on their behalf although the nomination must be accepted by the nominee to be valid.
• The list of valid nominees will be announced on opnfv-tech-discuss at the end of the nomination period and posted to the community wiki. One week will be allowed for community debate and discussion.
• Polls will be open for one week, from the 21st day after announcing the election until the 28th day at which point results will be sent to opnfv-tech-discuss and posted on the wiki.

• Elections are announced on the 7th of September, or the date of the first TSC meeting after September 7th, on the opnfv-tech-discuss mailing list.
• The nomination period will begin one week after announcing the election and will continue for one week, until 14 days after the election announcement. The nomination process for the TSC chairperson is by self-nomination.
• Polls will be open for one week, from the 14th day after announcing the election until the 21st day at which point results will be sent to opnfv-tech-discuss and posted on the wiki.