Open Stack

2012/10/11 Christopher B Ferris <chrisfer at us.ibm.com>:
> I'd like to see OpenStack Foundation adopt a policy it should have
> adopted at the outset. Limit Board representation
> to a single individual from an affiliated entity, period.

I think this would be a grave mistake.

If every single member of the community wanted the same two specific
individuals to be on the board, but they just happened to work for the
same company, why should that exclude one of them? This is a theoretical
situation, of course, but it demonstrates the point:

The goal shouldn't be to limit who gets elected. The goal is to prevent
a company from unduly affecting the results of the election. These are
orthogonal concerns. They only align somewhat under the assumption that
employees of a particular company only vote for candidates from their
own company and that noone outside said company votes for them.

If the community in general (i.e. not just those affiliated with a
particular company) find that some people are the best fits for the
board, those are the ones we should have on the board. So what if they
part of the same organisation?

It's not hard to imagine discussions where the two opposing positions
were favourable to corporate contributors and favourable to individual
contributors, respectively. The one-individual-per-company policy does
absolutely nothing to prevent large companies to fill the
board with individuals favourable to their goals.

Condorcet or STV would both be vast improvements over the current
election system, but if we're really concerned that large companies
excert too influence, why don't we limit the number of voters?

What if employees of platinum members couldn't vote at all? They already
have a representative on the board.

What if we weren't allowed to vote for people from our own company?

What if we flipped the vote upside down and instead of electing the
people who gets the most votes *for* them, we elect the people with the
least votes *against* them?

There are plenty of options that haven't been explored at all here.

-- 
Soren Hansen             | http://linux2go.dk/
Senior Software Engineer | http://www.cisco.com/
Ubuntu Developer         | http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer      | http://www.openstack.org/