Open Stack

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-08-01 at 12:37 -0700, Benjamin Black wrote:
>> why are employees of platinum and gold member companies allows to run
>> at all given that the point of the individual seats is to expand
>> representation to include those unable to pay to play? 
> 
> Directors elected by the Individual Members should serve to represent
> the Individual Members on the board. Directors appointed by Platinum or
> Gold Members are explicitly there to represent the interests of their
> companies.

Indeed, Directors elected by the Individual Members should represent the
Individual Members. Since it's quite easy to become an individual
member, the results for this one-third of the board might not be
representative of the contributors of the project, or might not favor
diversity. That's why there is a capping to a maximum of two directors
affiliated to the same company. Not perfect, but still better than the
alternative IMHO.

The suggestion of not allowing anyone from platinum/gold companies to
run for individual seats would exclude a lot of extremely-valuable
individuals who proved in their history with OpenStack that they cared
more about the project than about their current employer (or contracting
company). The Gold/Platinum companies happen to have hired most of the
brilliant individuals working on OpenStack, unsurprisingly.

So if we followed your suggestion, I think we'd actually end up with
something worse: one-third of the board composed of individuals not that
much involved with OpenStack, representing companies that could not
pay-to-play, rather than the best possible people to represent the
individual membership.

> Personally, I will only be voting for candidates who I think understand
> the distinction and will wear their "project hat" at all times on the
> board.

That's definitely what the individual members should do. Select people
they know will represent them as individual members. And we still have
the capping to prevent any abuse by any given company. And we get to
vote again in 6 months (!) to remove any Individual director who
revealed himself to be a corporate puppet.

In all cases, election-time is definitely not the right moment to
rediscuss the by-laws. Those have been discussed and drafted forever,
but apparently some people discover them at election-time. Where were
you, 6 months ago, when Mark, Soren or myself pushed alternatives to the
pay-to-play model ? The ship has now sailed, the rules are written and
we have to play by them.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)
Release Manager, OpenStack