Difference between revisions of "TC Elections October 2014"

Revision as of 15:35, 7 October 2014

TC Elections October 2014

Officials

• Anita Kuno (anteaya) anteaya at anteaya dot info
• Tristan Cacqueray (tristanC) tristan dot cacqueray at enovance dot com

Election System

Elections will be held using CIVS and a Condorcet algorithm (Schulze/Beatpath/CSSD variant). Any tie will be broken using Governance/TieBreaking.

Timeline

• October 3 - October 10, 05:59 UTC: Open candidacy for TC positions
• October 10 - October 17: TC elections

Elected Positions

Under the rules of the TC charter, we need to renew 6 TC seats for this election. Seats are valid for one-year terms.

• Technical Committee member - 6 positions

Electorate

The electorate for this election are the Foundation individual members that are also committers for one of the official programs projects over the Icehouse-Juno timeframe (September 26, 2013 06:00 UTC to September 26, 2014 05:59 UTC).

The electorate is requested to confirm their email address in gerrit, review.openstack.org > Settings > Contact Information > Preferred Email, prior to September 26, 2014 05:59 UTC so that the emailed ballots are mailed to the correct email address.

There is a resolution to the governance repo that all of the electorate is expected to follow: http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/governance/tree/resolutions/20140711-election-activities.rst.

Candidates

Any member of an election electorate can propose their candidacy for the same election (except the seven TC members who were elected for a one-year seat last April: Thierry Carrez, Jay Pipes, Vishvananda Ishaya, Michael Still, Jim Blair, Mark McClain, Devananda van der Veen). No nomination is required. They do so by sending an email to the openstack-dev@lists.openstack.org mailing-list, which the subject: "TC candidacy" by October 10, 05:59 UTC. The email can include a description of the candidate platform. The candidacy is then confirmed by one of the election officials, after verification of the electorate status of the candidate.

Confirmed Candidates

• Anne Gentle
• Monty Taylor

TC Election Questions

In order to help the electorate learn more about the candidates, a template of questions will be posted by September 26, 23:59 UTC on this wikipage for tc candidates to answer in their nomination email. As a way of encouraging voters, the election officials may take responses to the same question in candidate emails and compose a blog post in order to help voters inform themselves. Staying with a format of Question > Answer will facilitate this use of data should it be determined this is possible to do as well as helpful to voters.

These individual topics are selected to give a range of items for the electorate to compare candidates on similar issues. You are welcome to respond to the topic, to answer the question or to not respond. Your choice of response will be identified beside your name when the answers are organized by topic to help the electorate better understand individual candidates. This is the first time we are doing this so choices of where the responses are published might be decided after responses are received. Responses will be published on this wikipage by the electoral officials. Please include your responses in your candidate announcement email in a clearly defined section so the electoral officials can copy/paste with confidence. There is no guarantee your formatting will be preserved.

Template

Topic: OpenStack Mission
How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the OpenStack Mission?

Topic: Technical Committee Mission
How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the technical committee mission?

Topic: Contributor Motivation
How would you characterize the various facets of contributor motivation?

Topic: Rate of Growth
There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a substantial rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of this rate?

Topic: New Contributor Experience
How would you characterize the experience new contributors have currently?

Topic: Communication
How would you describe our current state of communication in the OpenStack community?

Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board
The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several different fronts. How would you describe these interactions?

Responses to TC Election Questions

Topic: OpenStack Mission: How do you feel the technical community is doing in meeting the OpenStack Mission?

Anne Gentle The technical community consists of a huge blend of people now, thank goodness, because the mission is a grand sweeping one for private and public clouds. Plus it has the word ubiquitous in it which makes it even more wide-reaching. We're making clouds for the planet and I feel we're tackling, blocking, clearing, and fighting hard to meet the Mission. We're struggling with the "simple to implement" but we have come a very long way.

Topic: Technical Committee Mission: How do you feel the technical committee is doing in meeting the technical committee mission?

Anne Gentle I feel the TC is supportive of the technical contributors to all the projects that make up OpenStack. We're constantly seeking ways to improve and challenge programs. We began to hold programs accountable for their integration. We pushed the limits of the definition of OpenStack by defining all code that a project maintains as part of OpenStack (defined sections). Yes, it was a defense on the side of our Active Technical Contributor community base, but it was a statement about our ideals - Openness, Transparency, Commonality, Integration, Quality.

Topic: Contributor Motivation: How would you characterize the various facets of contributor motivation?

Anne Gentle Contributors are motivated in different ways, but we're all humans and behave like humans do. In Peter Kollock's study of online communities, he found these motivating factors for participating: reciprocity, reputation, sense of belonging, efficacy, and need. All of these make sense to me when put in the docs context, "why would anyone contribute to upstream documentation?" and I can also draw maps and correlations to the overall reasons why contributors work on upstream. We need to be aware of what happens when the "need" stems from corporate motivation, but I know that OpenStack is a great community to work within and that I can do my part to demonstrate which motivations I want to encourage in our community.

Topic: Rate of Growth: There is no argument the OpenStack technical community has a substantial rate of growth. What are some of the consequences of this rate?

Anne Gentle Hopefully by now you've seen me represent the cross-project ramifications of this growth rate over the years I've served on the TC. The docs program has had to adjust the expectations and educate incoming programs about how OpenStack documentation is not just project-by-project but an umbrella effort. People come to docs.openstack.org for OpenStack docs, not just nova or glance docs. I hope I have shown bravery in the face of the rate of growth and also pragmatism.

Topic: New Contributor Experience: How would you characterize the experience new contributors have currently?

Anne Gentle As an admin for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women for the last two years, I have helped with on-boarding new interns who have to have a patch in order to complete their application. Really, though, the previous interns do a lion's share of the work in on-boarding newcomers to our community. I think this is because their eyes are freshest to the difficulties you'll encounter while figuring out our unique processes. I'm also amazed at how a wonderful small community has grown up out of helping others learn, and that's been the best part about seeing new contributors coming in. We've done a lot to make installing git review easier and specifically setting up the gerrit remote. So the very first on-boarding experiences can get better. Now, the experience of those of us a few years in isn't great either as reviews are harder and harder to get through and our gate is stuffed full with patches wanting in. I think we can work on both experiences at the same time to make it better for all contributors.

Topic: Communication: How would you describe our current state of communication in the OpenStack community?

Anne Gentle Communication with such a wide, growing population can be difficult but I think we have the channels available with opt-in policies that make sense for our community. The TC listens on many channels, I know I'm subscribed to all the mailing lists without filters still, and we made a concentrated effort to write summary blog posts to let everyone (not just ATC listers) know what we're up to. We understand its importance and we have a lot of good writers and communicators on the TC who make communication a priority.

Topic: Relationship with the Foundation Board: The technical committee interacts with the foundation board on several different fronts. How would you describe these interactions?

Anne Gentle Our interactions with the Board include conference calls, in-person meetings, and IRC meetings. I personally find the in-person meetings valuable as it's easier to communicate in person with more rich feedback so you can get a sense of how the interaction is going. On IRC, there's a trade off in richness of input/output but there is also a precision in the typed phrasing, the ability to read back later while you have more thinking time, and an openness since anyone can read the interaction at any time. Our board has been quite solid and changed little over the years which has been helpful for building relationships over time. I know I can reach out to members and I have had members help me when I've asked for it. I sense we're all struggling with the growth rate and feeling like we can't be as agile as we used to. But we're all dedicated to an open cloud for all and I think that shared mission enhances our interactions.