I approve of this change to the voting system. I was the originator of the current system, and it was optimised for a show of hands in a conference hall. We allowed people to vote as many times as they wanted to (because we couldn't prevent it anyway). Condorcet is a superior system and allowing people who can't make it to the conference to vote is beneficial for the legitimacy of the TAB. My thanks to those who have put effort into replacing the current system. On Tue., Jul. 2, 2019, 10:54 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Ksummit-discuss mailing list > Ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ksummit-discuss >