Open Stack

On Aug 4, 2016, at 8:35 AM, Flavio Percoco <flavio at redhat.com> wrote:

>> I believe the board has an informal replacement policy of looking back at the last election and taking the next person down the list, don’t they? That seems reasonable for us, too. In this case, since Morgan is going to serve until the election, we should select the 7th from those results to serve a half term. I think this is Thierry’s option 2, isn’t it?
> 
> Yeah, that sounds like Thierry's option #2. My point is, that I'd rather have
> someone serving for the entire year than half period. I agree this can happen
> even in the middle of the cycle.

Stepping outside of the OpenStack world for a minute, in general when a vacancy occurs in an elected position, there are procedures for filling that vacancy laid out in advance. They fall into two main groups:

1) a special election is held, with the winner filling the vacancy until the remainder of the term
2) someone is appointed by a higher-level official to fill that vacancy for the remainder of the term

I’ve never heard of anything like amending the laws/constitution/governance to handle this situation. It’s a fact of life that people can’t always fulfill their terms, so any solution we propose should be done with the idea of solving the issue for any similar future case.

If we choose #1, that’s pretty straightforward, but involves a lot of work. Thierry proposed something closer to #2, where the TC appoints the next-highest vote getter in the previous election to take over the vacant position for the remainder of the term. There really is no way to address Flavio’s concern with a new TC member only having a few months to make an impact. That’s life, and it isn’t ideal, but it is what it is.

Personally, I think some variation of #2 is best - it seems like overkill to run an entire nomination/voting cycle for a single seat for an abbreviated term. But whatever is decided, please make it part of governance so that the next time a situation like this comes up, we know how it will be handled.


-- Ed Leafe