openstack-poc team mailing list archive

[Stefano Maffulli <stefano@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello folks,

I, Dave Nielsen and Lloyd Dewolf (the elections committee) met today to
close the loop of the spring 2012 OpenStack elections with a brief
post-mortem analysis. Here are the results of our chat (and below for
your convenience).
http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/ElectionsSpring2012/PostMortem

There is a need for reducing the manual steps to prevent mistakes, like
leaving one candidate out of the ballot. It seems that we've got the
process right, and at this point it probably makes sense to spend some
time developing a tool to manage it. It's up to you to push this
further.

The elections committee has complete its job, thanks everybody. The
alias will stop working after this message.

Cheers,
stef

----

What Went Well
People seem satified that results of the elections are consistent with
the goals and direction of the project. Success. (Satisifed the
questions: did the "right" people get elected.) 

What Can Be Improved
The election workflow involved too many disparate tools and manual
intervention. The announcements went on the blog and mailing list, the
nominations are on etherpad, the confirmation of nominees happens via
email, the candidate's platform are on the wiki, the preparation of the
ballot is on CCIV tool. 

If a vote needs to be restarted again -- in this case a candidate was
missing -- it's essential that this can be done without revealing
results. 

Voters from author files should be automatically added to PPB election,
or at least explicitly notified of election and the requirement to
register. 

There was a potential for some awkwardness with an incumbent being able
to combine their normal leadership with their campaigning. 

Improvements
Have a system with consistent presentation and ability to facilitate
awareness of the candidates, demonstrate candidates contributions to
date, and conversation with them. The system should also manage
confirmation of the nominees in order to avoid sending email to nominees
to confirm their intentions. 

Candidates agreement on how and where campaigning will be done. From
there have time for candidates to make up their campaign and proposals. 

Authors files have to be kept up to date, with valid email addresses and
no duplicates. Authors should be added to the list of allowed voters for
PPB, skipping the registration process. 

The policy should be amended: on
http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Model where it says "Any registered
member of an OpenStack Launchpad group is eligible to run and vote in
these elections. " it should say "Any registered member of an OpenStack
Launchpad group is eligible to run in these elections. In order to vote,
the members of OpenStack Launchpad group will also need to register on
the voter's election tool whose URL is communicated at election time". 

Additional consideration to be used *carefully*: Use the process to
create more buzz for openstack, it may be an opportunity to let more
people know that this is an open community and participative.