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Hi everyone,

Last Thursday, the Foundation Board of Directors held a special telephone meeting to discuss updates for the Individual Director elections. As a reminder, the Board created an Election Committee earlier this year. The Election Committee has been meeting to discuss potential changes to the voting method used in Individual Director elections and had narrowed possible options for new methods to Single Transferrable Vote (STV) and Condorcet.

The Election Committee has an open mailing list (http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/elections-committee) and a wiki page (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Governance/Foundation/ElectionsCommittee) which both contain most of the information from their discussions. Coming into the Board meeting, Monty Taylor had prepared a briefing on Condorcet and Simon Anderson had prepared material on STV.

In the Board meeting on Thursday, Monty presented the Condorcet method and some of the specific details around how it works and how we could implement it. Simon then did the same for the STV method. The documents they prepared are available on the Election Committee wiki page. After the presentations the Board asked questions and held a discussion about the methods and the merits and weaknesses of each.

Todd Moore laid out the timeline for continuing to educate and gather feedback from the Board and overall community on making a change to the voting method with this being an important item for the in-person November 4th Board meeting in Hong Kong. The timeline is also linked on the wiki page.

One important upcoming date is October 29th when the Election Committee is planning to hold online feedback sessions to present the options and gather input from anyone who is interested in this topic. There will be two sessions held at different times to maximize timezone coverage. More details will follow.

If you are interested in this topic, I would encourage you to join the mailing list mentioned above as well as making time to participate in the October 29th meetings.

Jonathan