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On 01/28/2015 01:29 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Monty Taylor wrote:
>> You'll notice that I did say in my suggestion that ANYONE should be able
>> to propose a name - I believe that would include non-dev people. Since
>> the people in question are marketing people, I would imagine that if any
>> of them feel strongly about a name, that it should be trivial for them
>> to make their case in a persuasive way.
> 
> The proposal as it stands (https://review.openstack.org/#/c/150604/4)
> currently excludes all non-ATCs from voting, though. The wider
> "community" was included in previous iterations of the naming process,
> so this very much feels like a TC power grab.
> 
>> I'm not willing to cede that choosing the name is by definition a
>> marketing activity - and in fact the sense that such a position was
>> developing is precisely why I think it's time to get this sorted. I
>> think the dev community feels quite a bit of ownership on this topic and
>> I would like to keep it that way.
> 
> It's not by definition a technical activity either, so we are walking a
> thin line. Like I commented on the review: I think the TC can retain
> ownership of this process and keep the last bits of fun that were still
> in it[1], as long as we find a way to keep non-ATCs in the naming
> process, and take into account the problematic names raised by the
> marketing community team (which will use those names as much as the
> technical community does).

Agree. I actually don't think it's strictly important for the TC to
"own" this as much as I don't want the technical folks excluded. What
if, to reduce stress on you, we make this 100% mechanical:

- Anyone can propose a name
- Election officials verify that the name matches the criteria
-  * note: how do we approve additive exceptions without tons of effort
- Marketing team provides feedback to the election officials on names
they find image-wise problematic
- The poll is created with the roster of all foundation members
containing all of the choices, but with the marketing issues clearly
labeled, like this:

* Love
* Lumber
* Lettuce
* Lemming - marketing issues identified

- post poll - foundation staff run trademarks checks on the winners in
order until a legally acceptable winner is found

This way nobody is excluded, it's not a burden on you, it's about as
transparent as it could be - and there are no special privileges needed
for anyone to volunteer to be an election official.

I'm going to continue to advocate that we use condorcet instead of a
launchpad poll because we need the ability to rank things for post-vote
trademark checks to not get weird. (also, we're working on getting off
of launchpad, so let's not re-add another connection)

That said - having a script that the foundation staff can use to
generate a condorcet vote from the foundation membership rolls seems
like a generally useful thing to have. Since I'm causing trouble, I'd be
happy to help write it.

> [1] FWIW, it's been a long time since I last considered the naming
> process as "fun". It's not been fun for me at all to handle this process
> recently and take hits from all sides (I receive more hatemail about
> this process than you would think). As we formalize and clarify this
> process, I would be glad to transfer the naming process to some
> TC-nominated election official. I consider all this "taking back the
> naming process" effort as a personal reflection on my inability to
> preserve the neutrality of the process. It used to be fun, yes, when I
> would throw random names on a whiteboard and get the room to pick. It no
> longer is.

I think that in and of itself is a good reason to have a better process.
Anything we do can get contentious - and anything we do that adds to
stress or strain on you should be replaced by something that does not
add stress or strain. One of the nice things about a fully mechanical
voting process is that there is nobody that should receive hate-mail.