Jenkins Election 2021 Proposal

Community
,
1

Hi Everybody,

Time flies and the Jenkins elections period are coming.
We already had two successful editions in a row. I want us to continue on that path.
This is a tremendous opportunity for community members to influence the direction of the project for the next two years.

To make this year’s election even better, I am proposing to leverage our new community platform aka community.jenkins.io and I am looking for feedback.

I would like your feedback on the following plan.

To participate in the election, we ask every Jenkins community member to have an account on community.jenkins.io.
You can either reuse your Github account or create a new discourse account specific to community.jenkins.io.
The second requirement is to be able to showcase at least one contribution done before the first of September 2021.
As mentioned on www.jenkins.io/participate/, they are many different ways to contribute to Jenkins and for many of them, it’s very difficult to measure.
Therefore we’ll trust participants and will not require that they provide evidence of contribution as part of their voter registration. We reserve the right to ban the specific account from the election process if we identify abuse.

The election would then work in three stages:

.1 Identify voters and nominees
.2 Voting period
.3 Announce results

Identify voters
To invite participants to vote, we need a list of email’s addresses that we would share with civs.cs.cornell.edu
Therefore we ask every community members who match the requirement to join the group election-voter on discourse election-voter.
The group will be open for joining during the registration period after we’ll close registration during the voting period.

To retrieve emails from the “election-voter” group members, we’ll need to play a little bit with discourse API.

Identify nominees
During the same timeframe, we’ll ask every community member to nominate candidates by sending a message to the group election-committee.
Once the nomination period is over, we’ll notify every nominee and get confirmation that they are interested in running as a candidate.
Everybody can nominate an individual for specific positions.

Voting period
Once voters and candidates are identified, we’ll invite everybody to vote using civs.cs.cornell.edu

Announce Result
As soon as we have the election results, we’ll publish them.
Elected members will officially be the new officer/board member on the 3rd of December 2021.

I see the timeline as follow:

===Stage 0===

2021-09-01

  • Collecting feedback regarding the new process.

2021-09-08

  • Board members validate the new election procedure during the governance meeting

===Stage 1===

2021-09-09

  • Announcement on
  • Start of the voter registration process.
  • Start of the nomination process.

2021-10-31

  • Closing Nomination Period

===Stage 2===

2021-11-07

2021-11-30

  • Closing Voting Period

===Stage 3===
2021-12-03

  • Results announce

Key Information:

  • Nominees are referenced via the private group election-committee
  • Voters register for election using the public group election-voter
  • Nobody can register for the election once we send invitations to civs.cs.cornell.edu
  • Once the election is over, every member of the group “election-voter” will get a badge on https://community.jenkins.io as a “2021 Election Participant”
  • Once the election is over, every nominee will get the badge “2021 Election Nominee”

Any questions or suggestions?

I would like to submit this proposal for approval during the next Governance meeting which will be on the 8th of September so please provide your feedback before that date.

Cheers

1 Like
2

I think this should be the very first line, very clearly laid out cause i totally missed it.

3

I tried to send a message to the election-committee group, but there was no button to send a message. There was a button to request to join, but not to send a message.

4

Therefore we’ll trust participants and will not require that they provide evidence of contribution as part of their voter registration. We reserve the right to ban the specific account from the election process if we identify abuse.

What is wrong with the 2020 approach? It worked pretty well and did not require much time from participants to confirm their contributions. Looks like it is an adjustement that is needed to use Discourse for voter registration instead of Google Forms or other configurable solution.

While using Discourse might be okay, in 2020 we also used additional form fields to collect more information from voters, e.g. expectations from the board and feedback on the past period. It is a valuable source of info though it could be done via separate survey.

During the same timeframe, we’ll ask every community member to nominate candidates by sending a message to the group

It follows the previous approach. At the same time, maybe we could consider public nominations this year. IMHO public nominations for 2021 awards were a good experience for everyone, and they helped to celebrate contributions and recognize people even if they were not elected.

@MarkEWaite You need to send messages to the specified email. You will not be able to do it from the web interface without joining, same as for all other Google Groups

5

That was a permission issues, which I fixed now

6

As far as I know, you exclude contributor from countries that ban Google api such as China.
The idea of relying on discourse makes it easier to reuse participants through years as we are only interested by email adresses to invite voters in civs

7

I don’t have strong opinion on this. I don’t think that everybody is ready to publicly praise candidates so we may miss nominees. But it’s a personal opinion. By default I am just reusing what we did last years

8

As far as I know, you exclude contributor from countries that ban Google api such as China.

This is why we offered two ways to register in 2020: Google Form or email to the election committee. Board and Officer election process

9

In the context of the election, could you elaborate on which information was useful to collect this way?

10

@oleg-nenashev thanks for the feedbacks

1 Like
11

I shared a copy of the 2020 for with you. There were 2 questions asked:

  • “What are your expectations from the Jenkins Board and Officers?”
  • “Any Feedback To The Election Committee”

I found the responses to these questions useful. At the same time it can be collected using different ways, e.g. sending anonymous survey to everyone who registers for voting

12

I wrote the blog post here that announces the beginning of the election process. I would like to publish it next Monday. Once published, I’ll reuse the same content to publish on social networks

1 Like
13

I am closing this topic as we are now ready to start the election process.
Thanks, everybody for your feedbacks.

1 Like