Evolution Of OpenStack TC Voting

28 Sep 2018

This article is a somewhat follow up thought of which aspect of the current OpenStack TC voting mechanism could be improved, and also clarification on some issues

Don’t Pad Votes

Folks have been suggesting that one of the reason for APAC candidates continuing losts are due to lack of votes from that region. For example Chinese developers make up a large portion of the electorate but apparently only many 25% of them actually voted.

Like in any elections, we could always have a distinction of concepts on “Likely Voters” and “Registered Voters”. People who are eligavle to vote do not necessarily want to vote. So in political elections, we have seen downfall of polling that concentrates on RVs instead of LVs, and also GOTV activities before elections.

OpenStack as a open source technical community is a bit different. At least from the past 4 or 5 cycles, we could observe a rather stable number of people casting votes: around 400. The number is interesting because it almost equal to the number of people that attends the project team gathering (PTG) events.

This means “Caucus Goers” in OpenStack are usually active contributors. Therefore the core problems, in the example of China region, is not to get more eligible developers to vote, but rather to transform more downstream developers (many one-time fixers) to upstream which my previous post talked about.

Simply increase the turnout would amount to a padding of votes in my opinion, and it would create many problems such as identity politics (creation of semi-permanent electoral college). TC candidates should not represent certain region or demographic, although they should have a mandate (from the community perspective) for their terms at the committee.

In sum I don’t think the problem is not enough people voting, since there are people who are not interested in voting no matter what. The core problems is the upstream needs to drastically expend its global presence with more and more downstream folks start to participate. Developers who enjoys contributing in upstream, usually also likely to vote in elections.

Improve The Process

There are some areas I personally would like to see improvements on:

• Combine the campaign and voting period into one. It really confuses people when we start to use social media to compaign and then they found they could not vote yet, and by the time of the voting starts, many of them are distracted by other events. It is also very time consuming to have these two stages seperated.

• Better communications of the voting process. The foundation’s regional reps could help localized many of the election materials and also provide an explanation of the voting algorithm which is used.

• More exposure. I think especially for many APAC contributors, in addition to the Q&A conducted via mailinglist, we should explore more interesting options to make candidates visible and known to the wider community.