Open Stack

For those who won't read the giant wall of text below, a quick
summary...

If you want to run or vote in upcoming elections for PTL and TC,
make sure your Foundation Individual Membership is active and has at
least one Email address which matches an Email address in your
Gerrit account: log in at https://www.openstack.org/profile/ and
check that it says "Current Member Level: Foundation Member" near
the top and that at least one of the Primary, Second or Third Email
Address fields contains an address which matches at least one of the
entries available in the Preferred Email drop-down at
https://review.openstack.org/#/settings/contact (case sensitivity
doesn't matter but they at least need to be spelled the same).

If you're an "extra-ATC" and don't have a Gerrit account (this is
common for translators on the I18n team) then you still need to be a
Foundation Member to participate in technical elections and should
make sure your member profile includes the Email address listed for
you on your team's page at
https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/projects/ .

Now on to the long, boring details for people (like me!) who enjoy
reading them; much of this is taken from an Infra specification[1]
related to some ongoing work in this area...

According to the Bylaws of the OpenStack Foundation Appendix 4
Technical Committee Member Policy[2] (section 3b) along with the
OpenStack Technical Committee Charter definitions for APC[3] and
ATC[4], we limit the voter rolls for technical elections to
Foundation Individual Members. In order to comply with this
requirement in prior elections, we required all contributors to
CLA-enforced Git repositories to submit contact info to the Gerrit
contact store[5] which in turn pinged a simple API in the foundation
member system to confirm the preferred Email address in Gerrit
matched the primary Email address of an existing OpenStack
Foundation Individual Member.

This had a number of drawbacks:

1. It forced contributors to join the OpenStack Foundation even if
they had no interest in voting or participating in other member
benefits.

2. Our interpretation of the meaning of "contributor" for these
purposes was unnaturally limited to change owners in Gerrit, in part
because commit authors and co-authors weren't constrained by the
contact store process and so might not have been members; manual
listing as extra ATCs in the governance repo was the sole
workaround, and required cumbersome manual verification of
foundation membership for each addition.

3. The model was inherently flawed since it's been possible for a
couple years now for a member to officially resign or allow their
membership to lapse, but contact store submission was only ever
enforced once when the account was first set up and so we may have
been allowing lapsed or resigned members to vote in technical
elections.

4. The implementation was brittle and process confusing, resulting
in opaque errors which often confounded new contributors and overall
inhibited onboarding.

5. Because the protocol only submitted a single Email address and
backend implementation in the member system only queried against a
single address field, it forced contributors to use the same
primary/preferred address in both systems (at least initially).

6. Gerrit removed contact store functionality[6] upstream after the
version we're currently running, and we'd like to be able to upgrade
to a newer Gerrit release soon.

So what's changing?

Very recently the OpenStackID Resources system introduced a member
directory API[7] which is public and anonymous. Integrating this
into the change owners script[8] we use for generating electoral
rolls allows us to expressly filter out non-member contributors.

Side effect benefits include:

* it will properly limit voting rights for extra ATCs who have not
joined the foundation, eliminating any need for the current
cumbersome vetting process

* it may help further identify duplicate contributors where there
exist multiple Email addresses in the member system for a single
membership corresponding to multiple accounts in Gerrit with those
different addresses

* it can even enable us (should we choose) to more easily expand the
interpreted definition of ATC/APC to include a variety of other
types of verifiable contribution tied to a known Email address
including commit authors and co-authors

The reasons for this message:

1. Preliminary runs of the patched script suggest that nearly 13%
of our active contributors in the last year may not be eligible to
vote in or run in upcoming technical elections, so I want to make
sure this change doesn't take too many people by surprise.

2. I'd like to assess whether it's reasonable timing to implement
this change before the Queens PTL elections, or between the PTL and
TC elections, or should wait until after the coming TC election.

3. It would be nice to initiate a debate over ways we can
reinterpret the term "contributor" (per drawback #2 above) in the
future to more closely match the intent of our bylaws, once we have
this initial change behind us.

If you've read this far, find me at the PTG or Forum and receive a
free Infra team mascot sticker! I have... extras.

[1] https://specs.openstack.org/openstack-infra/infra-specs/specs/gerrit-contactstore-removal.html
[2] https://www.openstack.org/legal/technical-committee-member-policy/
[3] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html#voters-for-ptl-seats-apc
[4] https://governance.openstack.org/tc/reference/charter.html#voters-for-tc-seats-atc
[5] https://review.openstack.org/Documentation/config-contact.html
[6] https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/c/70458
[7] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack-infra/openstackid-resources/tree/app/Models/Foundation/Main/Member.php?id=5b6011d
[8] https://review.openstack.org/483974

-- 
Jeremy Stanley
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