Open Stack

On 08/01/2012 04:36 PM, Matt Joyce wrote:
>> Yes, I agree. However, I do think that there is already a safety valve
>> in there in the board membership cap. Having seen Postgres go to crap
>> when all of their core members were employed by EnterpriseDB, I think we
>> can safely say that we have learned something about ensuring
>> representation is at least spread across different backgrounds. HP and
>> Rackspace might have hundreds of foundation members, but they each still
>> have a board member cap. Additionally, I might point out, HP and
>> Rackspace are the ones running public OpenStack-based clouds at the
>> moment ... so they might actually _HAVE_ that many people actually
>> working on OpenStack related things. I also don't want to unfairly pick
>> on them because they are the ones who have decided to jump all-in on
>> this bet.
>>
> 
> I think that guarantees diversity in the board.  Which is terrific.
> But it doesn't eliminate the bias in the membership vote.  These are
> two different things.

Yes- potential membership vote bias is a different thing. Are there any
reasonable suggestions as to how to eliminate that in what's supposed to
be an open democracy?

The US has an extremely complicated voting system for exactly this
reason - the original fear was that the large states would effectively
have all of the voting and thus all of the representation and that the
small states would have a vote in the popular election, but no real
representation. This problem is present both in national presidential
elections as well as in the make up of the US Congress (with both a
proportional and a non-proportional body) It still doesn't prevent
people from complaining about disenfranchisement.

The problem with democracy comes down to being able to trust the will of
the voters. Oddly enough, sometimes different facets of this problem are
at odds.

The other day, Rick Clark was calling for nominations to all be public.
That sounds great on paper, but in actuality secret ballots are done to
protect the individual's ability to exercise political agency by having
their vote be free from scrutiny of a larger power that may be trying to
hold sway over them. Your company, or your union, or your neighborhood
mafia boss may want to influence your vote, but if it's not possible to
track the content of your vote to you personally, then it's not really a
coercible activity.

Similarly here - we can talk about HP and Rackspace stacking the deck
with tons of voters, but exactly how are they going to force a vote?
Anybody notice how if you send out a corporate email to 1000 people,
someone is bound to leak it? Anybody notice that such an email would be
in violation of the openstack foundation code of conduct?