Now that the election process for the community-elected governance committee has concluded, it’ll be good to hear feedback about the election process itself. This includes technical comments i.e. comments regarding the web platform used for candidate nominations, candidate endorsements, and the voting process itself but also non-technical comments about the election process itself e.g. guidelines for canvassing by candidates, timelines for the election, etc.
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First off, congratulations to everybody for pulling this off ! The number of votes cast is metric of engagement, and this election establishes a useful baseline.
I’d say there were some inconveniences. Since it was mostly techies voting, I am hoping we all figured it out.
The ballot page said “to elect 3 members to our Governance board”, but 5 options were presented, and 5 were chosen. I found this part was somewhat confusing but I kind of guessed there will be 5 chosen (read STV wikipedia article again at that time). I just cross checked - the governance thread also says 3 members to be elected. But anyway 5 is a better choice ! (I had a comment on the governance doc that 3 is too less and I support 5 - it being the next bigger odd number, and there being enough candidates in contention).
The web platform wasn’t mobile friendly - telegram links are naturally opened on mobile first. Even on desktop I didn’t see the text flowing naturally. Similarly on the candidates details page.
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I agree with @Shree_Kumar. A lot of people on mobile were not able to see many candidates so they voted for people who they were able to see.
The overall process was good, but I felt I couldn’t campaign as there was no direct link for voting and selecting the five was tricky. I cast my first vote to another candidate I liked, I hope that in the next round, I will participate again after being active and engaging with the community.
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I held back from commenting because I was afraid I’d influence others’ responses but it’s been a couple of weeks so here goes:
- @Ram_Iyengar and I were taking many of the decisions regarding the election but it’ll be good to have more folks from the community involved in the next election process end-to-end. Maybe an Election Working Group comprised of Foundation staff and Community volunteers
- a fundamental decision that @Ram_Iyengar and I decided early on in this whole process was universal suffrage i.e. everyone who thinks they are a part of FOSS United can vote. Logistically speaking, this means anyone who has an account on fossunited.org can vote. Please note that this isn’t a common choice - voting in many communities is usually restricted one way or another to a limited number of people. The Python Software Foundation for example limits voting to Supporting Members, Contributing Members, and Fellows. We’re happy with this decision but it’ll be good to revisit this decision e.g. discuss with the newly elected members
- It was serendipitous (or it was his experience talking) but the election timelines worked out how @Ram_Iyengar predicted at the 5th year anniversary, including the delays and releasing the results potentially on April 1st. But I think the timeline actually makes sense - a short election cycle of Feb and March with the results announcement in the first week of April.
- @Ram_Iyengar and I decided to use Single Transferrable Voting for the election process but we hadn’t decided on which method of counting we should use. Thankfully the results don’t change depending on the counting method (Scottish STV vs Meek STV) but it’ll be good to codify the counting method somewhere. For the record, the OpenStreetMap Foundation uses the Scottish STV method
- Early on in the discussions, @Ram_Iyengar and I wondered if the nominations should go through a screening process. For example, we wanted members of the community to second or endorse candidates running for election. Lack of endorsements from members of the Indian FOSS community would nullify a nomination. We didn’t proceed with this during this election cycle but we likely should do so in the next cycle
- Multiple people I talked to mentioned not knowing many of those running for election. This + the lack of endorsements + the lack of clarification around canvassing in this election cycle meant that people were either asking one another how to vote or were voting randomly - neither of which are good outcomes. For the next election cycle, the rules for canvassing should be made explicit, to ensure that the candidate, their endorsers, and members of the FOSS community feel comfortable canvassing for their chosen candidates
- Multiple nominations received questions/comments regarding their long-term vision for the FOSS United Foundation and I was also asked personally why this question wasn’t a part of the standard questionnaire. To be honest, I was super pessimistic about the whole affair and I was afraid no one would fill the forms. We need to rethink the questions on the nomination form for the next election and we also need to enforce minimum word limits on responses as multiple submissions had one-word responses to some of the questions on the nomination form.
- FOSS United Foundation staff are the only ones with access to the raw election data and it’ll be great if at least a couple of Community members could independently verify the results, if necessary, by downloading the raw data from the database themselves. This is a technical challenge and either involves updating the roles/permissions in the FOSS United/Ballot apps or the select Community members signing NDAs if they are given unlimited access to the FOSS United database (Frappe Desk UI)
A community member discovered a serious security vulnerability in Ballot which could be exploited by person A to cast a vote as person B. Thankfully, they reached out to us, informed us about the vulnerability, and told us about the fix. They asked us to crosscheck the “Voted by” information on a ballot against the person who “submitted” the ballot to the tech platform. We did this before tallying the results and verified that the only contaminated ballots were those cast by this community member.
We’re still comfortable using Ballot next year but we definitely need to look at other options e.g. https://opavote.com/ and evaluate the tradeoffs- @ashlesh , @Ruchika, and team did a great job communicating information about the candidates considering the short timelines we were working with and the last minute planning. For the next cycle, we should codify what information about the elections will be communicated and when
- we did our best with regards to communication within the FOSS United Community but we failed to communicate effectively to the organizations and communities that we work with regularly e.g. industry partners, current and previous event sponsors, venue partners, event community partners, etc. Members of the broader Indian FOSS community should be encouraged to vote (and run for election) in our elections
- we asked people to reach out to elections at fossunited dot org regarding any queries but we should have also asked people to report potential abnormalities during the voting process
- one week sounded like enough time to let people vote but we should reconsider the duration. It sounds like the OSM Foundation and the Python Software Foundation use a 2 week voting period. Please also know that the day when voting ends matters - does it end on a weekday or a weekend?
- a democracy needs informed voters so we now need a better round-the-year communication strategy to keep the voters informed of the governance activities. And we refers to both the Foundation and the broader Community. This experiment will only be successful if the various city communities, student clubs, and others in the Community proactively communicate about community governance to their audience e.g. reminding people at meetups, discussing this with speakers, etc
- STV elections and the way votes are counted in STV elections (e.g. using Scottish STV) are new to most people. I think we could have done a better job of clarifying/communicating this information to the Community
I didn’t expect 15 people would submit nominations and I definitely didn’t expect 400+ people would vote. But given that the FOSS United Community is ~10,000 people (e.g. social media following, telegram usage), we need to increase the number of people who vote next year. 400 is a great place to start but if we want to have a meaningful influence on tech policy in India, the number of active participants needs to be in thousands, if not tens of thousands.
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