Board election proposals

From openSUSE

This is a page for tracking suggestions to hold the board elections. This is a draft, and will not be final until discussed and approved by the board.

Policies already in place:

• The chair of the openSUSE Board will be appointed by Novell.
• Four additional board members will be elected, for a total of five board seats.
• Two board members will be community members employed by Novell.
• Two board members will be community members who are not employed by Novell.

Who can vote?

It's essential to have the ability to ensure a fair election -- this means that we need to be able to verify that the people voting for the openSUSE Board are in some way connected to the openSUSE project, have signed the Guidelines, and are counted only once when casting ballots for the board.

It may be necessary to restrict voting to members, so that we can ensure that we can verify that eligible voters get one vote -- no more, no less.

Each voter will be able to vote for four board members -- two employed by Novell, two from the larger openSUSE community outside of Novell.

The current proposal is to use a standard voting system (rather than a complex procedure like Condorcet).

Proposals and ideas from opensuse-project:

• Novell employees may only vote for Novell employees, and non-Novell for non-Novell (this was strongly rejected by almost everyone on the list though)
• you can't force people to vote, it must be voluntary (everyone seems to agree on that)
• have an account on the User Directory + have signed the Guiding Principles
  • problem with this loose approach: it is easy to automate and fake identities in the user directory
• have a public list of people who may vote before the elections and send everyone on that list a ticket to take part in the election
• only members may vote, as User Directory + signing the GP is too easy to fake
• require having signed the Guiding Principles at least 2 months prior to voting + the user has contributed in verifiable, significant way
• allow votes only from email addresses registered before some specific date (e.g. 1st January 2008) on the openSUSE wiki, on openSUSE-related forums (would require co-operation of forum operators) etc... + require confirmation of the voting email before accepting (using a hash code)
• restricting voters to the members would not be a good idea, as it would seem to the rest of the community that the Board is choosing their electorate (as membership status is granted by the board itself)
• requirement of involvement (posting to the lists, IRC, forums, ...) + User Directory account + signing the GP + a cut off period from about 1 month prior to the election

Who can we vote for

Proposals and ideas from opensuse-project:

• aims of various candidates should be represented ahead of time
• everyone should include their employer in their application/profile, especially people working for Novell
• have a nomination period of 2 weeks, then a campaign period for candidates (2 weeks)
• only members may be candidates for the board
• as in the GNOME foundation: no more than 50% of the elected board members may be affiliated with the same company (the GNOME foundation has a lot more members than the openSUSE Board, though)

Voting timeline

As part of the effort to ensure a fair and impartial election, we need to have a firm timeline of the process ahead of time so all candidates and eligible voters are aware of the deadlines to nominate candidates, campaign, and cast ballots.

An example timeline would be:

• Call for nominations, 14 days.
• Campaign period, 14 days.
• Voting period, 14 days.

This should ensure ample time for interested parties to participate.

Proposals and ideas from opensuse-project:

• collect the persons who can be voted for, then maybe a month of thinking time, and then 2 weeks to cast the votes
• elect board members for a period of two years, and only two board members up for election per year, to ensure some consistency
• elect substitutes (one Novell, one non-Novell)
• potential problem: someone resigns from Novell or from the community, or goes to work for Novell after being community, etc... (see substitutes above)

Note that the proposals from the opensuse-project list are ideas, they're not decided nor necessarily endorsed at this point of time.