Open Stack

> > > IIRC, there is no method for removing foundation members. So there
> > > are likely a number of people listed who have moved on to other
> > > activities and are no longer involved with OpenStack. I'd actually
> > > be quite interested to see the turnout numbers with voters who
> > > missed the last two elections prior to this one filtered out.
> > 
> > Well, the base electorate for the TC are active contributors with
> > patches landed to official projects within the past year, so these
> > are devs getting their code merged but not interested in voting.
> > This is somewhat different from (though potentially related to) the
> > "dead weight" foundation membership on the rolls for board
> > elections.
> > 
> > Also, foundation members who have not voted in two board elections
> > are being removed from the membership now, from what I understand
> > (we just needed to get to the point where we had two years worth of
> > board elections in the first place).
> 
> Thanks, I lost my mind here and confused the board with the TC.
> 
> So then my next question is, of those who did not vote, how many are
> from under-represented companies? A higher percentage there might point
> to disenfranchisement.

Well, that we don't know, because the ballots are anonymized.

So we can only make a stab at detecting partisan voting patterns, in
the form a strict preference for candidates from one company over all
others, but we've no way of knowing whether voters from those same
companies actually cast the ballots in question.

... i.e. from these data, the conclusion that the preferred pairs of
candidates were just more popular across-the-board would be equally
valid.

Conversely, we've no way of knowing if the voters employed by those
"under-represented companies" you mention had a higher or lower turnout
than the average.

If there is a concern about balanced representation, then the biggest
single change we could make to address this, IMO, would be to contest
all TC seats at all elections.

Staggered terms optimize for continuity, but by amplifying the majority
voice (if such a thing exists in our case), they tend to pessimize for
balanced representation.

Cheers,
Eoghan