Open Stack

Jeremy,
   Cathy is an owner of a recent commit: https://review.openstack.org/401349
Can you verify that she was eligible to vote.
 - Louis

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Stanley [mailto:fungi at yuggoth.org] 
Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 11:12 AM
To: Cathy Zhang
Cc: Tony Breeds; Tristan Cacqueray; Henry Fourie; openstack-infra at lists.openstack.org; Kendall Nelson
Subject: Re: [OpenStack-Infra] Ballot for Openstack elections

On 2017-02-23 18:37:49 +0000 (+0000), Cathy Zhang wrote:
> I strongly support the proposal to mandate this. To be fair, I think 
> TC should mandate this across all projects. In many complicated and 
> technically hard commits, co-author does not make any less amount of 
> technical contribution to the commit. If just the owner is counted, 
> people will start to fight for the ownership of a commit which is not 
> healthy for the open source community.
> 
> For my own case, it is well known that I am the initiator and project 
> lead of this networking-sfc project and have contributed a lot to this 
> project on the technical side and project management side. I have done 
> many reviews and approvals in this cycle and co-authored quite some 
> commits. It is a surprise to me that co-author is not counted as 
> technical contributor in Neutron.

The technical limitations for this in the past have been twofold:

1. Gerrit did not provide a usable API for querying arbitrary substrings from commit messages.

2. Voters must be foundation individual members and we had no way to query the foundation member database by contributor E-mail address.

The first is less of an issue in the version of Gerrit we're running now and the second is a situation I'm collaborating with the foundation's development team to attempt to resolve. In the meantime, the solution has been that PTLs should entertain requests from co-authors to be added to the "extra ATCs" list for their project. I don't personally have any objection to letting change co-authors vote in elections, we just don't (yet) have a solution to be able to automatically verify whether they're authorized to vote under our bylaws and charter.

Separately, there was a problem back when we used to provide free conference passes to code contributors, where someone at a company would submit a punctuation fix to a comment in some project, add half a dozen of their co-workers as co-authors, and then ask for free admission for all of them (this really happened). Relying on PTLs to vet extra ATCs before adding them was how we mitigated this.
Now that we no longer rely directly on code contributions to decide who should get free/discounted conference admission this issue should hopefully be purely historical. People seem to be far less interested in gaming elections than going to conferences (or in some cases scalping free tickets as a money-making scheme).
--
Jeremy Stanley