openstack team mailing list archive

[Mark McLoughlin <markmc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Atul,

On Sun, 2012-07-29 at 07:21 +0000, Atul Jha wrote:

> We've learned that someone may have violated the basic principles that
> hold this community together by trying to affect the nominations for
> the Individual Member elections. This is not what our community stands
> for, and we do not want to let the actions of one or a few tarnish the
> reputation of the thousands of individuals who are working to make
> OpenStack a great place to develop open source software. We are so
> determined to uphold our values that every member--individual or
> corporate--agrees to a code of conduct that prohibits abusive behavior
> and attempts to manipulate our elections.

Well said, we cannot allow the entire community to be tainted by the
behaviour of an individual.

> Our bylaws and election process have been defined and overseen by very
> experienced, independent legal counsel, Mark Radcliffe.

My understanding from:

  http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/openstack/foundation/14647

is that Mark was "retained to provide additional independent legal
advice" to the drafting committee.

>  We are completely committed to ensuring this process is open, fair
> and legitimate in accordance with our bylaws and Delaware corporate
> law. To ensure that the process is open, fair and legitimate, we are
> looking for individuals who would like to volunteer to be inspectors
> through the duration of the election to certify the outcome along with
> our counsel. No more than two affiliated members (working for the same
> company) can be inspectors, and any candidates who wish to run for
> election are also ineligible to be inspectors. As stated in the
> bylaws, "Each inspector, before entering upon the discharge of his
> duties, shall take and sign an oath to faithfully execute the duties
> of inspector with strict impartiality and according to the best of his
> ability." This will require a firm time commitment from any
> volunteers, as they will need to be available at a
>   number of points through the process to fulfill their duties in a
> timely manner. If you are interested in being an inspector, let me
> know.
> 
> Any complaints or concerns about the election process are taken
> extremely seriously. Each complaint will be reviewed by our
> independent counsel and addressed or brought before the full Board at
> its first meeting as appropriate. To facilitate reporting we have
> created an email address that is received only by the Foundation's
> independent counsel for review: electionmonitor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> We are also working on process improvements for nominations and
> elections--more details on that coming soon. In the meantime, please
> speak up or contact me or Mark Radcliffe directly if you have any
> concerns. We have all come a very long way in establishing the
> OpenStack Foundation--our Foundation--and are right on the threshold
> of having it up and running. Now is the time for us all to pull
> together and to make sure we continue to build the kind of inclusive,
> supportive community that has come so far in the last 2 years.

I don't mean to give offence, but I must admit the above strikes me as
rather bizarre.

The role "inspector" you refer to above seems to be about an individual
who may be appointed to make a written report of a meeting and any
voting that happens there, including by proxy.

You are laying out a mechanism for handling complaints about the
election process which involves Mark Radcliffe being the sole recipient
of those complaints. I know neither what your current role in the
Foundation is nor how Mark was appointed to this position.

Further, the mechanism above does not address the issue at hand - how
should the Foundation handle a complaint about a member of our
community[1]?

Personally, I assume good good faith and there's some reasonable
explanation for how this all came about, but we need to be careful here
- having people (apparently arbitrarily) assume roles in the Foundation
and establish new processes doesn't help matters IMHO.

...

Seeing the brouhaha on twitter last night, I had hoped the target of the
allegation would be named and we could sort this out in the open.
However, a name doesn't appear forthcoming and the text of the complaint
itself has been deleted.

Given the code of conduct that members are subject:

  http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/CommunityCodeOfConduct

and the bit about "OpenStack members ... are ultimately accountable to
the OpenStack Board of Directors", I think the way forward is for the
complaint to be made formally to the board so that they can investigate
the matter and report on their actions to address it.

The bylaws name Jonathan Bryce, Mark Collier and Alice King as the
"Initial Board". The complaint should be made to them.

If the complainant isn't satisfied with that and can't make the
complaint public, then we may need another process. That would need some
open discussion to figure out and IMHO may just be that the complaint is
taken to a meeting of the corporate members who have been working to
establish the Foundation.

Regards,
Mark.

[1] - the target of the complaint was not named, so I'm assuming for now
we're not talking about a "director, officer and employee of the
Foundation" who would be subject to:

  http://wiki.openstack.org/Governance/Foundation/CodeOfConduct