Open Stack

Thierry Carrez wrote:

>Edward Leafe wrote:
>> [...]
>> The current candidacy essay would now be posted in the campaign period,
>>rather than at the time of nomination, and should exclude the sort of
>>biographical information that is currently the most important piece for
>>many people. [...]
>
>As other mentioned, this is unlikely to give good results -- the track
>record of the person is much more important than what they pretend to
>care about in campaign emails (or their mastery of written English).

Is it, though? A person's track record might help to show how likely they
are to stick to their stated goals, but it's the goals themselves that are
actually going to shape the future of OpenStack. Ed quite rightly points
out that our current election system puts almost no focus on the agenda of
each candidate, in favor of how well their name is recognized by a wide
base of contributors. I do agree that name recognition in itself can be an
indication that the person has contributed and will continue to contribute
positively to the community, but it shouldn't be the primary metric.

On balance, I think that the community would benefit from an effort to
shift the focus more onto the issues than the individuals. The TC would
also benefit by receiving a greater mandate to accomplish the goals that
were voted for.

We'll need to acknowledge that the more well known names in the community
you would stand to lose a large advantage with the change Ed is proposing.
If we're going to seriously consider some level of electoral reform - and
I think we should - then it needs to be discussed and refined in the open,
and decided by community vote. The TC cannot be the ones to decide this,
as no matter how much we trust them, we cannot ignore the conflict of
interests it raises.

Thierry, I'm surprised by your open hostility towards candidates. Accusing
people of 'pretending' to care about things that they've taken the time to
write about is exactly the kind of bad-faith assumption that puts people
off from getting involved. This leads to self-censorship of dissent,
without which it is impossible to have any meaningful debate. I wish we
could disagree without resorting to personal attacks.

>In campaign emails, people always promise they have a lot of time on their
>hands, or they will change everything (or "be proactive"). But when the
>rubber hits the road, some vote one hour before the meeting, and some
>others don't show up at all. Campaign emails only bind those who believe
>in them. In my voting I prefer to consider the past availability and
>interest in those issues, the positions held on various threads and
>reviews, and the cooperative behavior (or absence thereof) exhibited in
>those discussions.

All valuable methods for weighing candidates against each other, which is
why I don't think dropping names completely is the right way to go. Again
though, let's not encourage the assumption that all candidates are lazy
con-artists until proven otherwise.

>Now, it's true that a lot of people vote on names, and don't take the
>time to dig into meeting logs and governance reviews. I'm not sure it's
>easy to fix though... you can't force people to spend time researching
>candidates.

And I don't think we have to. Something as simple as a few bullet points
about each candidate's intentions on the voting page would be a hugely
beneficial first step. If the current voting infrastructure doesn't
support that for whatever reason, then we should consider a different one.

>We could reduce the electorate to people more likely to have
>time to do that research (raise the bar in number of patches you have to
>contribute before you can vote) -- but that would require significant
>changes in the Foundation bylaws (where the "1 contributor = 1 vote"
>principle in carved in protected sections).

No, absolutely not. We went over this on the 'Write down OpenStack
principles' review[1]. The fact that the required research is so time
consuming is the problem. We should be making every effort to present the
relevant information at the time of voting. Of course this is easier said
than done, but if we don't help newer contributors feel like they're
making informed voting decisions, we're going to lose out on the
opportunity for our ever-changing demographics to inform our direction.

>Another path would be to facilitate that research. We could publish
>meeting presence metrics, but that would only encourage people to make
>random noise at meetings. We could ask incumbents to post a "here is
>what I did over the last year at the TC" as part of their platform
>email. Other ideas ?

I think a beneficial step would be to include the community earlier in the
process. A poll in the weeks leading to the self-nomination period could
be used to identify the issues people are most concerned about, and
candidates could be encouraged to address those issues directly in their
self-nominations. This would reduce the reliance on a potentially messy
question and answer period by pre-empting the greatest concerns.

I'm not sure I would go as far as removing candidate names entirely, but
actual substantive proposals like this are exactly what we need to drive
the discussion. Thank you, Ed.

John

[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/357260/4/reference/principles.rst


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