Re: election plans

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:

> 2- Slates.  We need to tell the Gnome community that people can present
> slates and give them basic rules.   Slates need to have 7 - 15 members,
> no majority from any one company, need to have 10 endorsements (with no
> more than 5 from any one company).  A slate should also include a few
> paragraphs about why this is a good slate, what it tries to achieve
> etc.  There's 2 obvious sources for semi-authoritative slates:
> -1: the Gnome Steering Committee: are you guys preparing a slate?
> -2: the foundation-list: Martin suggested preparing a slate.  Are we
> working towards that?

Well, I'm just waiting for some people to help ....

If noone shows up the next few days, I'll probably have to create the
slate alone.

> 3- Election apparatus.  I suspect we're not going to have more than 2 or
> 3 slates, so the easy way to hold the elections would be to just create
> an email address where all members can send email to.  The subject of
> their message would be the name of the slate they support.  That makes
> it really easy to tally results, to ensure than nobody votes more than
> once (you just use a mailman list), but the elections would not be
> secret (which I don't think is a big deal).  If we want more
> sophisticated election apparatus, it might get hard to pull off in time.

I don't like this "public" vote very much.

It shouldn't be so hard to make it at least a little bit more secret.

I think the best way to do it is the following:

1.) Create a GPG key for the election committee and put the private
    key on www.gnome.org and in the election call.

2.) All people who want to vote write a 1-line text file with the
    number of the slate they're voting for, encrypt it with the
    election committee's secret key, and mail it to the election
    committee.

3.) The election committee first collects all the mails from all
    people, check whether they're allowed to vote and collect the
    encrypted enveloples at some place.

    If we don't like the "security by email From: line" thingie,
    we can for instance create X (where X is the number of people
    with voting rights) random numbers and send everyone such a
    number.

    People will then need to enclose the random number they got in
    the non-encrypted part of the mail so the election committee can
    verify whether they are allowed to vote.

4.) When all encrypted envelopes are collected, the election committee
    deletes all original mails, logfiles etc. so you can't reproduce
    which piece belongs to which person.

5.) After that, the person who has the secret key decryptes all the
    envelopes and counting begins.

> 4- Election timeline.  To pull this off we'd need something like this:
> (1) agree on the above proposal (or some variation thereof) by July 26
> (Wednesday)
> (2) send email to Gnome mailing lists on July 27, inviting people to add
> themselves to the membership list and to submit slates
> (3) August 4.  Deadline for submitting slates
> (4) August 9-12.  Elections
> (5) August 13.  Winning slate announced.  That slate will be the
> founding board of directors of the Gnome foundation.
> 
> So let's decide if we think it's a sane idea to do the elections along
> this timeline.  The alternative is to have elections sometime after LWE
> and just announce the creation of the foundation at LWE.  Your thoughts?

I think we should try to do the elections before LWE so the initial
board of directors can come together and meet in person there.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)