Re: [Ksummit-discuss] Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections -- Change in Voting Procedures

[Bhaskar Chowdhury <unixbhaskar@gmail.com>]

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Whoa! awesome! cool ...second paragraph explainig the trouble..thanks a bunch Laura.

Thanks,
Bhaskar

On 10:49 Tue 02 Jul , Laura Abbott wrote:
>On behalf of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB), I'd like
>to announce that we are making changes to the voting procedures for the
>2019 TAB elections. The one-line summary is that we are looking to move
>to an electronic voting system instead of paper ballots with the purpose
>of giving more members of our community a say in the membership of the TAB.
>
>The longer explanation:
>
>The kernel summit was created as an in-person event for kernel developers to
>meet face-to-face and solve problems. When the TAB was created as part of
>the Linux Foundation, it made sense to have voting for TAB representation
>be part of kernel summit. Today, the kernel community has grown dramatically
>in size with a community across the globe. Attending an in-person event may
>not always be feasible for reasons such as finances, personal obligations, or
>visa issues. This means that developers who cannot attend kernel summit
>don't get a chance to vote for TAB representation. Moving to an online
>voting system would allow for more participation.
>
>The system we are looking at using is the Condorcet Internet Voting Service
>(CIVS) https://civs.cs.cornell.edu . This system was recommended to us
>by other communities who use it for similar board representation. It's
>designed with security and privacy as a priority and source code is available
>under a BSD-like research license (https://github.com/andrewcmyers/civs).
>For 2019, we intend to use the version of CIVS hosted on their servers
>because of serious concerns about the ability of the TAB to develop,
>maintain, and host CIVS. We would welcome support to make this happen in
>future years.
>
>One of the biggest changes with using CIVS is that we will be using ranked
>choice voting. Previously, the voting instructions were to vote for $m out
>of $n candidates. Each vote was treated as equal and the top $m candidates
>won. With ranked choice voting, you now express a preference from 1 to $n
>on how much you want a candidate. The theory is that this allows for
>more accurate and fair voting. The TAB had some discussion about this and
>we did discuss options for going back to our old voting method. In order
>to do this with CIVS, we would have to host our own infrastructure which
>we have decided not to do this year. Condorcet supports multiple voting
>methods and the method we plan to use is Condorcet-IRV. You can read more
>about the theory at https://civs.cs.cornell.edu/rp.html#runoff
>
>While the ultimate goal is to completely eliminate the need for in person
>voting, in the interest of small incremental changes, and avoiding too
>many changes at once, the voting pool is going to be approximately that
>of past years. Kernel summit is co-located with Linux Plumbers once again
>this year. Everyone who is registered for Plumbers will be eligible to
>vote in this years TAB election. The goal for future years is to continue
>to increase the number of eligible voters.
>
>If you have feedback, feel free to speak up here or privately at
>tab@lists.linux-foundation.org. We do intend to do a dry run of the voting
>procedure at a future date before the actual elections. If for some reason
>we run into unforeseen issues with electronic voting, we will use paper
>ballots for voting this year. Our goal is to increase the enfranchisement of
>the Linux kernel development community for TAB elections.
>
>Thanks,
>Laura
>
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>Ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss

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