Discussion: Who can vote and how?

We're discussing who will get to vote in the elections, and will appreciate any thoughts and inputs from the community.

Background

In the board procedures document shared by the Board, the following voting groups were identified:

NF member projects - 3 votes NF Affiliated projects - 1 vote NF Committee Officers - 1 vote Event Chairs - 1 vote

With the expectation that sponsored & affiliated projects will self organize to cast their votes.

This list is intended to represent all community stakeholders. The sponsored projects are the core stakeholders, and hence their votes are weighted higher (i.e., as 3 votes).

We'd like to maintain this overall share: Sponsored projects represent have 50% of total votes, affiliate projects - 25%, and committees, and events represent 12-13% each.

Concerns with the original groups

The projects vote as a group, while committee officers & event chairs get individual votes.

Sometimes, the officers and chairs are also a part of sponsored & affiliated projects, and we'll have to trust that they vote representing their committee/events and not their projects.

Proposals

Option 1: Keep the above-mentioned vote split

Option 2: Only group-votes

We can have votes only per-group, i.e., committees and events also vote as a group.

In this case, the total number of committees and events are small, so we will need to weight their votes as 2 or 3 votes to get the right vote share split.

Note that event groups are only active during the planning & running of events, so expecting them to coordinate and vote as a group is not ideal.

Option 3: Only individual-votes

We can have specific individuals representing sponsored and affiliated projects cast votes.

Individuals will need to mention the group they represent while registering to vote. If a person is involved in different groups (for instance, a sponsored project and event chair), they need to select one group to represent in the voting process.

The best way to ensure this is to run a voter registration drive, where we ask all groups to discuss and register the correct number of voting members. This will be tricky and take more time.

References

Voting groups spreadsheet: TBD

numfocus / elections