FESCo election policy

FESCo elections help to keep the leadership of the project in touch with the packagers who make up the project.

Digest

  • FESCo elections will be held twice a year, as part of the Fedora Project combined election process.

  • There will be 9 seats on FESCo.

  • 9 seats will be up for the F9 elections, the F10 election will have 4 seats up for vote. The 4 seats that will be up for election will be the bottom 4 vote-getters from the prior election. The 5 seats not up for election in the F10 election, will be up for election in F11. After that, the seats up for election will alternate based on the seats up for election in the prior election.

  • The elections will be announced in public lists. A reminder mail to eligible voters will be sent three days before the close of the election.

  • Candidates may be any member of the packager group in the Fedora Accounts System.

  • Candidates must self-nominate at least three days before the election opens by writing their information onto the wiki.

  • A minimum number of candidates are necessary in order to hold an election. This will be the number of open seats + 25%.

  • If not enough candidates have signed up by the deadline, the election may be delayed waiting for more candidates to appear, in coordination with the schedule for combined Fedora elections. If there are still not enough candidates, the candidates who are present will be voted upon (or merely confirmed if there are less candidates than open seats.)

  • If there are not enough candidates to complete the ballot, all the contributors listed in this section will be added to the ballot.

  • If FESCo does not have the full number of seats filled at this point, the vacant seats will attempted to be filled by the following methods:

    1. If there are runner-up candidates from the previous election that did not have the opportunity to be on FESCo, they will be offered a seat according to their rank in the voting.

    2. If those candidates have been exhausted, FESCo will ask Fedora community members that they think would do a good job if they would be willing to hold the open seats.

    3. If the open seats are still not filled, FESCo will operate with less members until the next FESCo election.

The voting is as follows:

  • A voter receives a ballot listing all the candidates.

  • For each candidate the voter assigns from 0 to number of candidates points.

  • At the close of the election, the points for each candidate are tallied and the ones with the most points win a seat.

There are no term limits imposed by this policy. If FESCo chooses to impose term limits for its internal positions (Chair, VP, etc.), those should be specified in the FESCo by-laws.

Schedule

FESCo elections will be held twice a year, as part of the Fedora Project combined election process.

The elections will be announced in public lists.

Seats on FESCo

There will be 9 seats on FESCo. 9 seats will be up for the F9 elections, and the following election will have 4 seats up for vote. The 4 seats that will be up for election will be the bottom 4 vote-getters from the prior election. The 5 seats not up for election in the F10 election, will be up for election in F11. After that, the seats up for election will alternate based on the seats up for election in the prior election.

Candidates

Candidates may be any member of the packager group in the Fedora Accounts System. This helps ensure FESCo members have some experience with the processes of Fedora but still allows relatively new contributors to sit on FESCo and bring fresh ideas to the table. Candidates must self nominate at least three days before the election opens by writing their information onto the wiki (Fedora account, email and irc nick, statement of past contributions and what they hope to accomplish while a member of FESCo.) In addition, candidates must not be a citizen of an export-restricted country (see Legal/Export#Embargoed_Destinations for the list of export restricted countries).

In order to hold an election, a minimum number of candidates are necessary. This will be the number of open seats + 25%. If there are 4 seats available, there will need to be at least 5 candidates. If not enough candidates have signed up by the deadline, the election may be delayed waiting for more candidates to appear, in coordination with the schedule for combined Fedora elections. If there are still not enough candidates, the candidates who are present will be voted upon (or merely confirmed if there are less candidates than open seats.) If FESCo does not have the full number of seats filled at this point, please see Filling Vacant Seats below.

Contributors who want to nominate themselves only if there are not enough people to fill the seats may put the same information on a separate section of the wiki page. If there are not enough candidates to complete the ballot, all the contributors listed in this section will be added to the ballot. No special considerations will be made for candidates elected through this process to resign their seats after the election. If you really do not want to be on FESCo, please withdraw your name from this list at least three days before the election so your name does not go on the ballot.

Voters

Voters may be any member of cla_done (have a contributor agreement with Fedora) and one additional group unrelated to signing a contributor agreement.

Filling Vacant Seats

If FESCo does not have all its seats filled due to members leaving or other lack, the vacant seats will attempt to be filled by the following methods:

  • If the remaining duration of the vacated seat’s term is less than a full Fedora release cycle, a replacement should be appointed by the remaining members of FESCo by full consensus. If no consensus can be reached by FESCo, the Fedora Council will be asked to select from the available candidates through whatever mechanism they see fit.

  • If the remaining duration of the vacated seat’s term is more than a full release cycle, then a candidate will be appointed as for the above case until the next election cycle begins. During this election cycle, the normal election seats will be filled first by the candidates with the most votes. After those seats are filled, any vacated seats will be filled by the candidates with the next-highest number of votes.

  • Vacated seats filled outside of the normal two-release cycle will serve for only a single Fedora release cycle so that their seats are back on schedule for the following term.

Voting System

The voting model for the election aims to be simple, easy to audit, and fair in case someone resigns and their runner-up is selected. We have chosen a specific method of Range Voting to address these criteria.

A voter receives a ballot listing all the candidates. For each candidate the voter assigns from `0` to `number of candidates` points. At the close of the election, the points for each candidate are tallied and the ones with the most points win a seat. For example, if we have 20 candidates running for 9 seats, the voter will be presented with a ballot where they can assign 0-20 points to each candidate. After voting, the 9 candidates with the most points will win the election.

Notes

There are no term limits imposed by this policy. If FESCo chooses to impose term limits for its internal positions (Chair, VP, etc) those should be specified in the FESCo by-laws rather than this document.

The voting application needs to be enhanced in the following ways to support this policy:

  • Web based administration to create a new election.

  • Creation of a new election needs to trigger generation of a script that will interact with the accounts db and election db to send out a reminder to vote message three days before the close of the election.

  • The interface will show the voter ballots for all the elections that they can vote in.

Other enhancements:

  • List upcoming elections.

  • List results for current and previous elections.

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