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election_proposal

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Election process revision proposal

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.

Problem statement

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

Current by-laws and election process

The election-related sections of the by-laws are as follows (extract from complete by-laws):

Section 2.7 Privileges of Individual Committer Membership

Each Individual Committer Member, while in good standing as a Committer on a project (as such requirements for such Committer role shall be established by the Technical Steering Committee from time to time), shall be entitled to:
- run for election as a Director and participate in the election of Directors in accordance with Section 4.3(e) of these By-laws;
Section 4.3 Nomination, Election and Term of Office of Directors

- Following the first release of the Platform, each Individual Committer Member (while remaining in good standing) shall have the right to vote, together with the other Individual Committer Members as a class, to elect one (1) Individual Committer Member to serve as a Director (the “Individual Director”), to serve until the next annual action of Members without a meeting and until his or her successor is elected and qualified or until his or her earlier resignation or removal. The selection of nominees for such position shall be made by the Individual Committer Members (as project committers) and approved by the Board through such nominating procedures as may be set by the Board from time to time.
- Any Director nominated, appointed or elected by any class of Members or the Technical Steering Committee, or by any Member, may, but shall not automatically, be re-nominated, re-appointed and/or re-elected for additional terms.
Section 5.5 Committees of the Members
- A Technical Steering Committee of the OPNFV shall be established consisting of (i) a project lead from each top level project, (ii) a representative designated by each of the Platinum Members, subject to Section 2.4©; (iii) a representative designated by each of the Platinum Strategic End-User Members, subject to Section 2.4©; and (iv) such number of individuals to be elected by the active committers as may be specified and under such procedures as may from time to time be approved by the Board. ​ The operation of the Technical Steering Committee shall be governed by the rules of process of such Committee as from time to time approved by the Board.

Proposed process

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

Also, I would like to suggest 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 advancem to allow for people to indicate timing issues like this). And I would like to suggest avoiding July and August for all OPNFV elections, due to the risk of disenfranchising voters on vacation.

election_proposal.1443479752.txt.gz · Last modified: 2015/09/28 22:35 by Dave Neary