Open Stack

On 26/02/19 10:19 AM, Ed Leafe wrote:
> On Feb 25, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote:
>>
>> This is a problem for OpenStack, for at least the reason you mentioned above: TC members don't have much of a mandate if they didn't actually have an election.
> 
> That’s a good point: do you (all candidates; not just Zane) see the election as being a mandate for specific things? Candidates run on different platforms, expressing different desires for changes they would like to make. Do you see the result of a TC election as a mandate to go out and do those things, and not to do the things that the losing candidates espoused?

I explained my theory about that in a previous ML post a few weeks ago:

http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-discuss/2019-January/001841.html

In short, in order to co-ordinate across a group of people everyone in 
the group needs to have some reason to think the other people in the 
group are going to move in the same direction. Relaying the direction 
through an elected group helps to do that, because everyone believes 
that everyone else voted for that group - and in the aggregate they're 
correct.

I expect that effect would be significantly weakened (though not 
completely eliminated) if there was no election (which would mean that 
TC members effectively appointed themselves).

> The counter, and extremely cynical, argument here is that people don’t really weigh the specific proposals of the individual candidates and choose those most in alignment with their feelings, but instead choose people who they either a) worked with at some point and didn’t find them to be a jerk, or b) have seen their name around for a while, and figure they must know what’s going on, or c) have the same employer, or d) some other non-issue-related reason. If this cynical point of view is closer to how you see reality, does that represent a mandate at all?

Yes, sadly I think it's likely that a & b at least play an outsize role 
(I _hope_ that c doesn't play a big role, and I do think that people 
consider actual issues or at least general philosophies to some extent). 
But interestingly it doesn't matter! The above effect turns out to still 
work even though it's just a convenient fiction, like money, or Belgium. 
It still works even though you all just read this message where I called 
it a fiction :)

cheers,
Zane.