Open Stack

Excerpts from Thierry Carrez's message of 2014-10-30 04:16:48 -0700:
> Eoghan Glynn wrote:
> >>> I haven't seen the customary number-crunching on the recent TC election,
> >>> so I quickly ran the numbers myself.
> 
> Haven't been able to run my analysis yet. I should be able to a few
> weeks after summit :)
> 
> In complement to the "partisan analysis" you ran, one interesting
> analysis is to see how much the results would be different if we enable
> the "proportional vote" option in CIVS (which is designed to deter block
> voting). I'll do that one.
> 
> >>> The turnout rate continues to decline, in this case from 29.7% to 26.7%.
> >>>
> >>> Here's how the participation rates have shaped up since the first TC2.0
> >>> election:
> >>>
> >>> Election | Electorate | Voted | Turnout | Change
> >>> ------------------------------------------------
> >>> 10/2013  | 1106       | 342   | 30.9%   | -8.0%
> >>> 04/2014  | 1510       | 448   | 29.7%   | -4.1%
> >>> 10/2014  | 1892       | 506   | 26.7%   | -9.9%
> >>
> >>
> >> Overall percentage of the electorate voting is declining, but absolute
> >> numbers of voters has increased. And in fact, the electorate has grown more
> >> than the turnout has declined.
> > 
> > True that, but AFAIK the generally accepted metric on participation rates
> > in elections is turnout as opposed to absolute voter numbers.
> 
> It's the generally-accepted metric in classic elections, which have a
> slow-growing electorate.
> 
> I agree that a decline in global participation is not a good trend, but
> in our case I think it's more an artifact of our long tail of small
> contributors than true decline in interest in existing voters.
> 
> What is *is* showing is that we grow the number of people who care about
> OpenStack governance at a smaller rate (+12%) than we grow raw
> contributors (+25%).

It may be worth noting that we are also doing things _right_ if the TC
isn't having to do much that impacts the broad base of ATCs.

Decentralizing things in the way we've been looking at lately, would
mean there is less involvement by the TC in ATCs' business. That would
then lead to less familiarity with the candidates and incumbents, and
indeed less interest in the election process.