Open Stack

I agree with Thierry and have mentioned this during the last board meeting.
I don't think there is anything fundamentally wrong with the election
process itself. We should just focus on pruning inactive foundation members
and creating a sensible, minimal barrier to voter eligibility.

Is there anyone who does not agree with this?


On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 5:31 AM, Jonathan Bryce <jonathan at openstack.org>wrote:

> Just so people aren't working off incorrect information, we do have a
> mechanism in the bylaws to deactivate inactive members. Also, we do go
> through and remove duplicate member records before each election cycle
> starts.
>
> Jonathan
>
>
> Thierry Carrez <thierry at openstack.org> wrote:
>
> Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> >   - with such a large electorate, getting a majority of a 25+% voter
> >     turnout to vote for an election system change is going to require a
> >     lot of awareness raising. I'm trying to imagine a massive "our
> >     election system is broken, it's critical you turn out to fix it"
> >     being a positive thing. I'm also concious that if we did hold a
> >     vote to move to STV and it was rejected, that could be the end of
> >     the matter forever.
>
> Frankly, if getting a 25+% voter turnout is seen as an impossible task,
> that means the membership is fundamentally broken. And I think it is,
> due to the low bar of entry and lack of membership expiration.
>
> A precondition to any rule that defines a minimum membership turnout is
> to keep the membership sane and active. If we keep members forever, then
> we are bound to have stale entries in that database and getting 25% (or
> even 5%) turnout will one day just be impossible.
>
> So the first step in fixing this mess is to sanitize the membership. I
> would send out emails to existing members and give them two weeks to
> confirm they are still active and would like to participate to the
> upcoming elections. Send a reminder after one week, then remove all
> entries that did not click the right button. It's no big deal anyway,
> they can re-add themselves very easily if they want.
>
> In parallel, I would go through the list and remove obvious duplicates
> entries. Looking at the members directory, there are a LOT of them, and
> each of them makes that 25% target less likely.
>
> Then we should not fear changing the rules, because that 25% target
> would actually work the way it was intended, not as a rule to block all
> future changes.
>
> --
> Thierry Carrez (ttx)
>
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