From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (smtp1.linux-foundation.org [172.17.192.35]) by mail.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id E5E2619A0 for ; Tue, 2 Jul 2019 14:49:58 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-qt1-f193.google.com (mail-qt1-f193.google.com [209.85.160.193]) by smtp1.linuxfoundation.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id D3359834 for ; Tue, 2 Jul 2019 14:49:57 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-qt1-f193.google.com with SMTP id d17so18711205qtj.8 for ; Tue, 02 Jul 2019 07:49:57 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lauras-mbp.fios-router.home (pool-96-235-39-235.pitbpa.fios.verizon.net. [96.235.39.235]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id s134sm6843280qke.51.2019.07.02.07.49.56 for (version=TLS1_2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Tue, 02 Jul 2019 07:49:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Laura Abbott Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Mac OS X Mail 10.3 \(3273\)) Message-Id: <5A0ABD9B-34F3-44FE-838E-D66F3BB5D15B@labbott.name> Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 10:49:53 -0400 To: ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org Subject: [Ksummit-discuss] Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections -- Change in Voting Procedures List-Id: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , 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