Community election process proposal for Drupal Association Board | Drupal Groups

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Community election process proposal for Drupal Association Board
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Be bold!
Posted by
webchick
on
January 11, 2012 at 7:42am
rachel_norfolk
on Mon, 2020-08-10 13:06
This page should now be regarded as "historical information", now that the 2020 Election pages are at
-- Rachel Lawson, Community Liaison.
Overview
The Drupal Association is holding its first round of elections for "at-large" (community-elected) board members under its new governance structure. This proposal was prepared by numerous community participants, including the Election Committee members, at
and related sub-threads.
Election Timeline
December 30 - January 14 (2 weeks): Election committee works with community to develop plan for elections.
January 15 - 17 (3 days): Final refinement of plan, get election tools in place.
January 18: Voting proposal submitted to BoD for ratification. Ratified, yeah!
January 18 - January 29: Nomination process (Note: extended by three days.)
January 30 - February 7: Questions, discussion, and debate
February 3 - February 7: Voting
February 8: Election results for at-large members submitted to board for ratification.
Nomination process
Candidates for the community board positions should be self-nominated.
This prevents electing candidates who have the support of the community, but who are unable or unwilling to serve. If community members feel a particular member would make a great board member, they should encourage that individual to nominate themselves.
A nomination form will be set up on
to capture nominations, containing the following fields:
Who am I? (biography/background)
Why I'm running (mission/motivation)
Why you should vote for me (qualifications)
"I am willing and able to travel to in-person board meetings [Y/N]"
Other data (Name, Drupal.org username, Location, Company/Organization) will be pulled in from Drupal.org profile data and displayed on the nomination pages once they are public.
Beyond a valid drupal.org account, no additional restrictions shall be placed on nominees
, including geographical location, company, and willingness to travel to in-person board meetings. However, these facts should be made clear in the nomination form so that community members can factor these into their voting process, if desired.
At no time will a nominee be required to disclose publicly any financial hardships which might prevent them from attending the in-person board meetings without financial assistance. If elected, the Drupal Association shall cover the travel expenses of members who are unable to find other means of subsidizing their attendance, or find alternate arrangements (e.g. Webex or similar) for folks who can't make it.
Election process
Submissions will be opened for public viewing and comment only once the nomination process has closed
, to help prevent bias towards people who submit applications earlier. This posting will kick off a process where community members will have a chance to learn more about the nominees.
Individuals can ask questions to/about individual nominees on their nomination pages, and will be additionally encouraged to post on
to ask broader questions/bring up issues to
all
nominees.
Finally,
two meetings shall be set up by the election committee to allow the community and nominees to discuss issues in "real time."
The two meetings will be held in opposite timezones, using both the phone and IRC simultaneously, to allow the most people to participate as possible. Meetings will also be recorded and archived for later review by people who couldn't make it.
Voting process
Voting will be open to all individuals with at least one drupal.org account who have logged in during the past year and whose account was registered before nominations opened (February 8, 2012)
. While not representative of the
entire
Drupal community, this represents a significant enough cross-section while providing some ability to prevent voting fraud.
Voting will be done with the "Instant Run-Off Voting" (IRV) alternate voting system
, in order to ensure the fairest representation of the community's views as possible. For elections, a form will be provided where voters rank the candidates according to their 1st, 2nd, 3rd... preferences.
Elections will be held on
, capturing anonymized voting results (the users who've voted will be logged, but not for whom they voted). A checkbox to certify that a voter has not already voted in an election will be placed on the form as a basic means of recognizing voter fraud concerns.
The only people who will have access to raw voting data are key individuals on the
Drupal.org infrastructure team
who also have access to all other sensitive Drupal.org data.
The elections committee, plus one community volunteer, will share election results publicly on the morning to the board meeting on February 8th
. These results will then be sent to the board for final ratification.
Categories:
Governance
Comments
I've updated this document to
Posted by
webchick
on
January 13, 2012 at 8:27pm
I've updated this document to reflect consensus reached in today's meeting. Here's the diff for review:
I believe this is more-or-less final now, and reflects broad community consensus. However, we still have until Monday to really nail it down if people want to suggest changes.
Technical implementation
Posted by
webchick
on
January 13, 2012 at 9:05pm
Technical implementation issue at
Fraud concerns
Posted by
Crell
on
January 14, 2012 at 12:42am
The fraud concerns of this method are glossed over far far too easily. Many people, especially very active people, have multiple accounts for testing purposes. I know webchick and sun do, at least. I suspect many infra people do. That's very hard to detect. And there's nothing to stop someone from signing up for a ghost account or five right now, seeing this proposal in place.
How do you differentiate between
Dave Reid
and
Rodney the Cat
? Both accounts meet the above criteria. There is no way to do so except manually.
Really, I've run online elections before, both in Drupal and not. "Have an account that's posted" is not a sufficiently secure definition of "voter". It's way too easy to defraud,
especially
if you want anonymity, and
especially especially
if you want anonymity at the vote level.
The degree to which that issue seems dismissed here makes me very very nervous.
I had the same thoughts when
Posted by
mac_weber
on
January 14, 2012 at 1:08am
I had the same thoughts when I read the draft. We need ideas to minimize the risks of fraud.
How about doing a pre-registration of voters? People who is willing to vote would have to register with their real name (which would not be publicly displayed) and maybe even with a copy of his/her iD.
The downsides are: we will get much smaller of voters, because many people will not vote because they do not want to register or forgot to register in time; to really check the picture of the IDs (of many different countries) would be a manual process, difficult to do depending of the number of voters registrations.
Well, definitively we need more ideas!
We did definitely have
Posted by
webchick
on
January 14, 2012 at 5:39am
We did definitely have discussed concerns around voter fraud, both in the discussion, in IRC, and on the call today. They're serious, and need to be considered.
However, the general feeling was that while voter fraud is a very real issue that
could
happen, on balance it doesn't counter-act the very real issues that
will
happen if we go the DA membership route. Namely:
It excludes the
vast
majority of our community from the voting process - only 0.6% of active, valid d.o accounts are DA memberships. (If we further limit it to only people who are willing to send a copy of their ID to strangers over the Internet, that number approaches 0.)
You could therefore argue that choosing this option goes against our by-laws, since these are supposed to be "community"-elected positions, not "member"-elected positions.
It creates a "pay to play" situation with voting which further excludes people, particularly among under-represented countries on the board today.
It would fundamentally change the direction of the DA to becoming a member-based organization, which really is something that needs longer discussion and, ultimately, board approval.
So if we think voter fraud is something we should be vitally concerned with for this first election (I'm personally far more worried about how we're going to get the word out that there
is
an election in the first place :\ ), I'd much rather us go the route of brainstorming how we might put technical facilities into either advpoll or decisions module to try and catch any shenanigans.
voter fraud
Posted by
kattekrab
on
January 29, 2012 at 12:39pm
@webchick said
I'm personally far more worried about how we're going to get the word out that there is an election in the first place :\
Yeah - I have some concerns about this too - I suspect that the vast majority of the community / constituency have close to no idea this process is even in train.
Is it possible to email / contact form everyone on D.O and tell them the election is happening? They have already missed the nomination window too - which is a shame.
Of course voter fraud is a real concern, and we should do our best to mitigate against the risk, but I'm not too sure we need to be overly concerned for our very first election ever do we?
Some form of voter registration system might be worth considering... eg, everyone who has an account on DO is eligible to register - but registering raises an additional hurdle of some sort...
To enrol to vote in Australia (where every citizen MUST vote) you fill in a form, and must get it signed by someone already on the electoral roll. I don't know how we do that, when we don't yet have a roll. Chicken and Egg anyone? But effectively, it means someone endorses you, and that someone must also swear they are telling the truth, etc.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member
Drupal Association
(2012-2018)
@kattekrab
Yeah - I have some concerns
Posted by
slef
on
February 29, 2012 at 11:10am
Yeah - I have some concerns about this too - I suspect that the vast majority of the community / constituency have close to no idea this process is even in train.
Hell yeah. And what's more, we disenfranchised potential voters get rather grumpy when the first we know about it is seeing some random drupal user's tweet after voting has closed.
g.d.o mails me for tons of stuff: why not this?
Discussion period vs. voting period
Posted by
nedjo
on
January 18, 2012 at 5:19pm
I realize we haven't separated out the period of debate/evaluating candidates from the actual voting. Should we? Probably we don't need a week+ for voting. And having voting take place before any discussion or debate doesn't make a lot of sense.
The reason I coupled those
Posted by
webchick
on
January 18, 2012 at 5:58pm
The reason I coupled those together is because if we just leave voting open for 3 days (for example), it might mean people can't actually vote because those 3 days they're traveling or their kid is sick, or whatever.
I anticipate most people leaving voting til the end of that period, but in case they can't, they can get their vote in early and have it count.
I'm not married to it, obviously, but the intent was to make it as open as possible.
Overlap
Posted by
Crell
on
January 18, 2012 at 8:10pm
In my experience having an overlap is fine, but you want to have a "campaigning" period without voting. At least try to make it something more than a pure popularity contest. :-) In my RPG club we have a 1 week nomination period, 1 week "campaign" period with no voting, and then 1-2 weeks of voting with continuing campaigning (depending on whether or not we have a runoff).
Also something to consider: Endorsements. We can't stop people from publicly expressing support for a candidate, but do we want to have any rules/guidelines/expectations about where or when that's acceptable? Again going back to my RPG club example (sorry, it's been 14 years I've been dealing with elections in that place...), it used to be de facto procedure that no one endorsed until voting started, but then one time around a few people backing one candidate started endorsing immediately after a candidate was listed and it created a deluge of endorsements that drowned out anything any candidate was actually saying. (That candidate did eventually win.) In response, in our next election (which I managed) we introduced a rule that you could not post an endorsement until voting opened, again to give candidates 1-2 weeks of "alone time" where they could actually, you know, say stuff before the Super PACs got involved. :-)
I'm not saying we need to have the same kind of restriction, just that we should be thinking about what (if anything) we want to do about 3rd party support.
Good points
Posted by
nedjo
on
January 23, 2012 at 5:24pm
I'm thinking staggered/overlapping periods are better than opening voting the moment we post the list of candidates. And thanks too for the cautions about endorsements. Probably we should at least reference this as we announce candidates and invite discussion.
staggered.
Posted by
kattekrab
on
January 29, 2012 at 12:41pm
yes - time for discussion, debate & "campaign speeches" should occur after nominations close, and before voting begins. yes yes.
But I don't think campaigning should overlap with voting.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member
Drupal Association
(2012-2018)
@kattekrab
Final edits
Posted by
webchick
on
January 18, 2012 at 6:15pm
Here were the final edits made to the proposal:
which were essentially:
Clarify fields on form vs. fields pulled in from Drupal.org user profile
Addition of required "I have not already voted" checkbox on voting form, as basic voter fraud deterrent.
Announcement of voting results, by whom (election committee + 1 community volunteer), and when (the morning of the board meeting, before the meeting occurs).
Meeting starts in 1 hour!
We're a GO!
Posted by
webchick
on
January 18, 2012 at 9:50pm
The Board approved this proposal, and we've got the technical bits into place for the nominations, which start NOW.
Please see
and
for more info.
I think we can continue to discuss refinement of things like election timeline, since that doesn't kick off until next week, and the board basically said "we trust what you guys come up with" so. :)
w00t!
Posted by
arianek
on
January 19, 2012 at 5:19am
That's great news, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out with the planning process for the nominations and voting. Thought there were appropriate compromises all around, and though there's always room to improve, we've reached a good starting point.
HUrrah!
Posted by
kattekrab
on
January 29, 2012 at 12:30pm
well done @webchick, @nedjo and @highermath for sheparding this through so far :) Great effort.
Donna Benjamin
Former Board Member
Drupal Association
(2012-2018)
@kattekrab
Implementation details
Posted by
nedjo
on
February 6, 2012 at 10:56pm
We're working through details about implementing the election in the drupal.org issue queue:
Nomination
Posted by
MinoltaAk
on
February 5, 2017 at 6:21am
I have a question, I just signed up with drupal, my technical skill is like a level one, but if interested how does one go about nominating himself? And while your here, is there a possibility someone knows exactly which documents and downloads I need so I can start seeing what the fuss is over? Please explain in a way a level one guy would get... thanks.. aki
aki19772017@icloud.com
Start Here
Posted by
riaan burger
on
February 5, 2017 at 10:00am
Hello MinoltaAk,
Start here:
Just about all you need to know can be downloaded or found from links on that page. With only 3 hours (at time of writing) on your profile age, your participation will be limited a tiny bit though. You can't vote until your account is a year old, for example. But participation is about more than just voting and becoming familiar with everything should be interesting enough already. Then perhaps join in discussions, interviews and the like.
Cheers
Drupal Association
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