[GRASS-PSC] GRASS PSC elections in 2016

[Markus Neteler]

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 4:17 AM, Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at ncsu.edu> wrote:
>> On May 14, 2016, at 11:34 AM, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org> wrote:
>> Dear PSC,
>>
>> time has passed since the last elections in 2012. As the chair of the
>> PSC I suggest that we renew part of the current PSC (see:
>> https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/PSC#Members).
>> I suggest the following tentative schedule:
>>
>> - May 2016: preannounce elections (see this email) and
>>  - identify members who do not stand for election
>>  - identify inactive members (here the Geoserver PSC has some useful rules [1]
>
> I find the Geoserver rules rather drastic - they are really important for governance model where
> PSC makes a lot of decisions about development which is not the case for GRASS

ok, agreed.

> I assume that our inactive members won’t be interested in standing for election and
> that way their membership will end.
> As suggested, we should have 3 year term membership so everybody will have to be
> re-elected at least once in 3 years.
> I like the way how the board of directors is elected - it ensures both the continuity and rotation of members.

I am fine with that. The point is: all for election now or ~ half of the PSC?
>From off-list communication I know that 3 seats will become vacant.
We have 10 PSC seats in total, hence 3  becoming vacant, 7 for
potential re-election.

I see three options now:
a) fill the 3 slots by election;  In 3 years from now elect ~ 50% of the PSC.
b) identify more current members to volunteer for potential
re-election or randomly select them.
c) Dissolve the PSC and have election of all slots.


>>  - assign free'd up slots to election
>> - May 2016: officially announce PSC elections

We need to hurry up :)

>> - 16 June 2016, 12:00 UTC: nominations possible by community
>> - June 2016: elections (here it would be great use the technology of
>>   the OSGeo charter member elections)
>
> there will be new technology used this year - Vasile knows more about it.

I'll contact him.

>>  Here we have the problem to not have a charter membership.
>
> we can have a system where anybody can nominate a candidate and the contributors with
> svn access (both core and add-ons) vote - can you find out how many we have ?

Yes:
https://www.openhub.net/p/grass_gis/contributors
(forget about the "inactive" indication there, not true for all names
tagged there)

> This is just my suggestion to keep things simple - we can put this out for dicussion on the
> GRASS dev and users list.

Yes. This list is not much read anyway.

>> - July 2016: PSC communicates the new members.
>>
>>
>> IMPORTANT:
>> We need to solve the following issues:
>> - how to remove members from the PSC? (see [1] for inspiration)
>
> see my comment above - I don’t think the Geoserver model is good for us
> (I don’t like kicking people out of anything), I think members should go through re-election every 3 years
> if we start with this elections, third of the current member slots should open up
> and the current members affected should stand or not stand for re-election.
> We can randomly  pick up the slots to be freed to start the cycle.

So you suggest to elect 50% = 5 slots this time?
That would correspond to b) above.

>> - how to elect new members?
>
> if we have enough developers with svn access (core and add-on) they could represent “charter members”
> because they are considered trusted members of the community.

... that makes sense but is not too inclusive.

> But it would be good to find a way how to include power users who do not have svn access.

We could add the Addon SVN contributors.
Perhaps also check who is editing trac.
How to scan the mailing list I don't know.
Another option is "must be nominated by at least X other users/mailing
list members".

Honestly, I currently don't have the time to run a complicated system.
Any volunteer?

> In the document [2], I think the nomination should go also to GRASS dev list (in addition to PSC and users list).

Yes. But: this requires a list subscription. Or one of us forwards it.

Markus


>>
>> [1] http://docs.geoserver.org/latest/en/developer/policies/psc.html#stepping-down
>> [2] https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/wiki/PSC/Election2016 (draft)