Create language about special Community Seat elections #609
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In the 2021/07/02 Steering Committee, we discussed what happens if the company of a holder of a Community Seat earns a Contribution Seat. We raised the idea of holding a special election in ~Feb, immediately following the appointment of the Contribution Seat. This PR is language that describes this. As this is a change to the Steering charter, it will require an affirmative vote of at least 80% of the Seats, or 11 of the 13.
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Co-authored-by: craigbox <craigbox@google.com>
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@craigbox wrote:
I think that is a reasonable point, but should be in a separate PR. |
| @@ -81,7 +81,11 @@ and community, beginning in August 2020. | |||
| the seat for the term. | |||
| 1. Because the goal of Community Seats is to increase the perspectives on | |||
| the Steering Committee, employees of a Company that holds Contribution | |||
| Seats are ineligible to be elected to hold a Community Seat. | |||
| Seats are ineligible to hold a Community Seat. | |||
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Do we need to mention by when the special election will be held? Additionally, since we have 1 seat less until then how does the voting/decision process work?
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We don't specify a timeframe for the regular elections, so I didn't want to put one here.
The seat is community voted, not Steering voted.
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I was referring to voting within Steering for decisions with 1 seat less (i.e. 12 seats) if the elections and filling the seat takes longer than what we desire.
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Oh, sorry; the charter expresses all voting in terms of percentage of the Seats, and in the common case, 60% of 12 or 13 both round up to needing 8 votes. I don't see that causing any issues.
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I thought about the timing question. I started to write something, and then personally thought that boxing ourselves in was unnecessary. "Special Election" by definition means at an unusual time.
I don't think the number of seats in Steering matters, since this election is from the community. For other decisions when Steering is understaffed, the 60%/80% thresholds apply.
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LGTM |
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It seems like we're making this problem for ourselves by staggering the community and contribution based seat selections. I think we could simplify things for ourselves and the community by avoiding a special election and instead aligning the contribution and community seat elections. We can appoint the contribution based members, then run the community elections immediately afterwards. As I understand it the original intent behind staggering the two sets of seat elections was to reduce churn on the steering committee. In practice, based on the contributions to the project, this doesn't seem likely to be a problem for the project (eg it seems unlikely that Google or IBM/Redhat would be unseated). So, I propose that instead we align the two elections: elect contribution seats, then open a community election for the remaining seats using the current rules. |
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I approved this PR by accident :| |
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Running an election takes about 4 weeks, and we can only do it once we know which candidates are available. If we did the allocation on Jan 31, as usual, and things changed in the Contribution Seat pool, then we would end up in the same situation until the Community Seat election time had passed. Maybe the easy compromise here is:
(Dates subject to change) |
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I agree with @ZackButcher and @craigbox suggestions to try an have an overall steering committee change over at the same time. We could extend the contribution seats and/or shorten the community elected seats for this year. If we start to community seats selection now with the idea they start mid-April, there could be a compromise moving Craigs dates one month later (Feb 28 2023 is the date for contribution seats -> April 2023 starts that year as an example). |
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Agreed with other suggestions to align the contribution and community elected seat changes. We could perhaps also consider changing the contribution seat tally to align with community seat elections - either do as @craigbox suggested, or even change the contribution deadline to Feb 28th for example. |
This seems reasonable |
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A quick update from the Steering Committee: this is going to be an issue for this Contribution Seat allocation, and thus we're going to resolve it. Two members from the Community Seat group are being moved to Contribution Seats. There will be two empty spaces as a result. We have two proposals on the table:
Steering members: please vote for one of the two options with the reactions shown above. |
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(This is not a vote on the charter change, which we'll process separately.) |
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The runners-up are kebe7jun and keithmattix |
Thanks Ram!! What about the next one after Keith? As kebe is likely getting a contributor seat. |
After keithmattix, it's therealmitchconnors |
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Thank you, at the present time, our company (DaoCloud) does not have a contributor seat. Is it possible for us to obtain a community seat? From https://github.com/istio/community/blob/master/steering/CHARTER.md |
Our projections are that DaoCloud will gain a contributor seat when they are next allocated. |
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A new draft of this change is open for discussion in a Google Doc. I'm closing this PR as Sean is not longer involved in the project, and will open a new one (linked from here) when we are ready to proceed to a vote. |
In the 2021/07/02 Steering Committee, we discussed what happens if the company of a holder of a Community Seat earns a Contribution Seat. We raised the idea of holding a special election in ~Feb, immediately following the appointment of the Contribution Seat. This PR is language that describes this.
As this is a change to the Steering charter, it will require an affirmative vote of at least 80% of the Seats, or 11 of the 13.