Open Stack

Hi everyone,

At the TC meeting Tuesday, members agreed on the need to change the TC
membership model, but diverged on the ideal solution. Three models were
mentioned in various preference orders. It was suggested to set up a
Condorcet poll to help select the model which was the most consensual
and the most likely to reach the threshold of two-thirds of members (10
"yes") necessary to pass a TC charter modification ("special motion").

The Condorcet winner of this poll[1] is the "All-directly-elected"
model: Direct election of TC members over the whole ATC membership using
a staggered election every 6 months resulting in one-year seats. Total
members would be 11 or 13.

Now we need to further discuss and refine the details of this model to
come to a clear motion which will be voted on at a future TC meeting.

One of the details we need to discuss is the exact number of members. 11
or 13 ? In the 11 case, we'd renew 5 members every Fall and 6 every
Spring. In the 13 case, we'd renew 6 every Fall and 7 every Spring. A
minimum of 6 members would be necessary to hold a meeting in the 11
case, and a minimum of 7 members would be necessary in the 13 case.
Special motions would take 8 "YES" in a 11-member TC, while they would
require 9 "YES" in a 13-member TC. Personally I don't care that much
either way, I think both would work.

Another detail is how to encourage diversity while keeping the
simplicity of the model. One way to do that might be to use the
experimental "proportional" algorithm from CIVS[2]. As markwash
suggested, I think we could run the first election(s) as pure Condorcet
but save the (anonymized) ballots and check what the results would have
been with the "proportional" option enabled. If they seem to still
result in natural Condorcet winners but give us additional protection
against block voting, we'd consider enabling that option for future
elections.

Final detail would be how to run the transition from the current TC. We
currently have 2 people recently-elected to a one-year term and 13
people elected for a six-month term[3]. As a transition, the idea would
be to elect in the Fall 2013 election 9 people (5 one-year member and 4
six-month members) in the case of a 11-member committee, or 11 people (6
one-year member and 5 six-month members) in the case of a 13-member
committee. The next election in Spring would then see the normal renewal
of 6 (over 11) or 7 (over 13) members.

Thoughts ?

[1]
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_7e44637905f0251b
[2] http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html
[3] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/TechnicalCommittee

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)