Open Stack

On Thu, 2013-06-06 at 12:24 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> 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.

Slight preference for 13, since it might give us more diversity. Don't
see a big downside to having 2 more people.

> 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.

Sounds good.

> 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.

Again, sounds good.

Cheers,
Mark.