Election Reminder Notification

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[!NOTE] This pull request will be reused for future election notifications.

Recently we kicked off the first election for the Nix Steering Committee as a major step towards a renewal of project governance.

Since starting this election, we've had a lot of engagement in the election repository with 25 nominees being endorsed by more than 80 different people.

We're now approaching the end of the nomination phase with some upcoming deadlines:

• 2024-09-29 Sun: Deadline for nominations.
• 2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for endorsements of nominees without enough endorsements. You will not be able to vote for nominees that don't have sufficient endorsements.
• 2024-10-03 Thu: Deadline for asking questions to candidates.
• 2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for submitting voter exceptions and updating voter email addresses. You will not be able to vote if you cannot receive emails on the registered address.

Furthermore, if you're a nominee yourself:

• 2024-10-01 Tue: Deadline for accepting the nomination and submitting the candidate form.
• 2024-10-06 Sun: Deadline for answering questions you'd like to answer.

Following these dates, the final list of confirmed candidates along with their forms is expected to be published on 2024-10-02 Wed, while voting starts on 2024-10-07 Mon.

Note that deadlines are in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning submissions are still valid as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12).

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We've now reached the end of the nomination phase, ending up with 25 confirmed candidates!

All candidate forms have now been published together:

https://github.com/NixOS/SC-election-2024/tree/main/candidates

We're also confirming that there are no same conflicts of interests among the candidates, meaning that there will be no further need to take the constitutional conflict of interest restrictions into account.

Candidate Q&A deadline

Until this Thursday, eligible voters can still ask questions to candidates, and are encouraged to do so. Note that questions can also be based on the candidates forms.

Until this Sunday, candidates can answer questions they'd like to answer.

Email update deadline

Until this Sunday you can check and optionally update your email address. You will not be able to vote if you cannot receive emails on the registered address.

The voting phase starts on Monday and will last for almost 2 weeks until 2024-10-20 Sun.

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Candidates for the first Nix Steering Committee have now been selected, and the voting phase of the election has begun. The list of voters is now final, and the deadline for exception requests and updating emails has passed.

You must cast your vote by 2024-10-20 Sun in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12). After the poll is closed, votes will not be accepted for any reason.

We will send a reminder to vote on 2024-10-18 Fri.

The Candidates

Please inform yourself about the candidates by looking at their candidate info documents, which include:

• Basic contact info
• A conflict of interest disclosure
• A statement on their motivation to be on the Steering Committee
• All Q&A questions answered by the candidate, followed by ones not answered

Each candidate's individual info document is also linked on the ballot.

How to vote

To be able to vote, you need to activate your email in the voters.json file with CIVS by following the steps on the CIVS Activate User page.

If you already did so, you should've already received an email from civs@cornell.edu with a link to the poll.

If you're only activating your email now, you will get a link to the poll in the activation page under "Pending poll invitations". If you missed this, you can go through the email activation again.

If you have a question, please contact the Election Committee.

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Unfortunately the CIVS poll we used for the election got corrupted due to technical issues out of our control. A symptom of the problem is that the system appears to allow voters to vote multiple times. As such we are invalidating the existing poll, please hold off voting for a new future poll instead. Already submitted ballots appear to be irrecoverable. We apologise for the inconvenience.

According to the CIVS admin, a data corruption like that has never been seen before. The CIVS FAQ[^1] implies this to be first time data has been lost since 2006. As far as we understand, the Berkley DB files got corrupted in such a way that at least the table of the voters who have voted is not handled correctly anymore.

We have no insight into the CIVS server, but are in contact with the admin to try figure out what went went wrong in more detail and how to best proceed. We will follow up with another announcement no later than this Friday.

Email updates possible again for now

As a consequence of the above, we can again allow email updates until the new poll is started. To do so, follow these steps.

The candidates

You can also still prepare yourself to vote by looking at the candidates.

[^1]: Archive link

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Because we don't have sufficient confidence in the CIVS problem not reoccurring again, we have decided to use OpaVote to collect the ballots instead. We're still going to use CIVS tallying of the results, so that they won't get influenced based on how ballots are collected. Note that OpaVote (like CIVS) allows the voters to get an anonymised list of all the ballots cast, and we will enable this after the election.

Unlike CIVS, OpaVote doesn't require a separate activation step for emails, so all eligible voters with email addresses considered valid will be sent emails with the voting link from noreply@opavote.com, as well as voting reminders every 3 days.

You must cast your vote by 2024-11-03 23:59:59 Sun in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12). After the poll is closed, votes will not be accepted for any reason.

Note that, unlike CIVS, OpaVote does not allow to correct your ballot once cast! Furthermore, you cannot rank two candidates the same, except for unranked candidates. We will treat all the unranked candidates as tied for the last place when tallying.

Removed email addresses and how to set them

Because OpaVote's terms has potential sanctions for undeliverable emails and doesn't have a separate email activation step like CIVS, we have removed some voter email addresses that couldn't be reached.

We cannot change the voter emails where the voting link has been delivered, but for missing and bouncing addresses, users can still update their email address. Everybody without an email address in voters.json will be notified once more.

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This is the last reminder, you must cast your vote by end of this Sunday, 23:59:59 in Anywhere on Earth time, meaning as long as it is still the given day anywhere on the planet (i.e. at the end of that day in UTC-12). After the poll is closed, votes will not be accepted for any reason.

Please also be aware that if you leave the voting page open for more than an hour, you won't be able to submit the ballot without reloading and losing what you entered, so you might want to make a screenshot beforehand!

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After successfully using CIVS to tally the 450 ballots cast (56% turnout) on OpaVote, We are hereby concluding this election! We congratulate the first members of the Nix Steering Committee (SC) (ordered alphabetically):

• @Ericson2314 (2 year term)
• @fpletz (1 year term)
• @Gabriella439 (2 year term)
• @jtojnar (2 year term)
• @roberth (2 year term)
• @tomberek (1 year term)
• @winterqt (1 year term)

This result is certified by all Election Committee members.

For verification purposes, all OpaVote ballots will soon be available here (the result there should be ignored; voters will also get an email), while the CIVS tally to determine the result using the same ballots is already available here. See the new docs for more info on result verification.

We are now establishing communications with the first SC members and will soon make a final handover announcement on behalf of the EC / NCA.

We, the members of the EC / NCA, and @refroni from the NixOS Foundation board, are thankful for everybody's participation in this first election, and are looking forward to see the first SC getting started.

Note that you can also read and publicly discuss this announcement on Discourse.