On Tue, Feb 26, 2019 at 4:25 PM Ed Leafe <ed@leafe.com> wrote:
On Feb 25, 2019, at 8:01 PM, Zane Bitter <zbitter@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?

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?


What you mention is the exact reason why I claimed in my candidacy ballot to have more folks for the election [1]. I don't remember since when we started to have campaigns for the TC election (at least 3 or 4 IIRC) but i hope it will help the election to not be just a popularity contest, but rather a way for voters to better know the individuals before giving them a ticket (and actually pounding this ticket using the Condorcet system if they really want to favor a candidate close to their own opinions).

If we were less or equal the number of TC seats, what would have been the representativity of such candidates who would have been elected by default ?
Now, that's not because we have an election and that we have a campaign period that it will mean that those individuals will feel as 'members of parliament' (at least for me). One of the key values of OpenStack is Open Design on a consensus model. We all have great opinions and we care about our own opinions, but we also need a majority of contributors agreeing with.

-Sylvain

[1] https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/election/plain/candidates/train/TC/sbauza%40redhat.com (last paragraph)

-- Ed Leafe