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OPNFV community elections are executed in a transparent and fair manner in accordance with the OPNFV bylaws complete by-laws.

OPNFV community elections are held annually with elected nominees service a one year term where possible. Elections are traditionally held during September at the end of the previous term for elected roles in accordance with OPNFV's annual cycle beginning October 1st.

The process is defined as follows to ensure community members are aware of an election, have an opportunity to check the voter roster, and are aware of candidates who have already nominated before themselves nominating to run.

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

Elections for the community board seat are held annually.

• 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.

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, including (but not limited to):
  • Git commits
  • Gerrit reviews
  • Wiki page edits
  • Blueprints submitted to upstream projects
  • OPNFV User Group co-ordination

The logic behind this is that 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. We will soon have community metrics we can use to measure participation in other areas, and we should use these to define voting rights.

• Elections for the community board seat should be held annually, in the month of September, and must be announced one month in advance of the close of the election date (the month of September is arbitrary, added because the 1st election was in September) on the opnfv-tech-discuss mailing list
  • Polls will be open for one week, and results will be sent to opnfv-tech-discuss afterwards
  • The candidate list will be announced on opnfv-tech-discuss 14 days before the close of the election, to allow one week for community debate and discussion
  • The nomination period will open 21 days before the election closes, and will last for one week. Nominations should be sent to opnfv-tech-discuss with a nomination statement. Nominations can be made by any active technical contributor, but must be accepted by the nominee to be valid.
  • The list of eligible voters (who are also the list of people eligible to be candidates) will be published to the OPNFV web-site when the elections are announced, one month before the close of the election, to allow one week for errors and omissions to be corrected.

The purpose of these proposals is to ensure that the community members are aware of an election, have an opportunity to check the voter roster, and are aware of candidates who have already nominated themselves, before nominating themselves to run. One month before the election will give ample time to debate the issues of the day.

As a separate proposal, I would like to propose that for the community board seat, that full (anonymized) results are published to allow independent verification of the results. This is standard in most community project elections.

I would also like to propose that the same rules apply for the election of the TSC chairman, with some modifications:

• Elections announced 3 weeks before polls close
• One week nomination period, with nominations sent to opnfv-tsc
• One week polling period
• Results sent to opnfv-tsc

I would like to propose that when choosing dates for the TSC elections, that we avoid major European, North American and Chinese holidays (another reason to announce the elections in advance, to allow for people to indicate timing issues like this). July and August should be avoided for all OPNFV elections, due to the risk of disenfranchising voters on vacation.