On 30/10/14 06:22, Eoghan Glynn wrote:
IIRC, there is no method for removing foundation members. So there
are likely a number of people listed who have moved on to other
activities and are no longer involved with OpenStack. I'd actually
be quite interested to see the turnout numbers with voters who
missed the last two elections prior to this one filtered out.
Well, the base electorate for the TC are active contributors with
patches landed to official projects within the past year, so these
are devs getting their code merged but not interested in voting.
This is somewhat different from (though potentially related to) the
"dead weight" foundation membership on the rolls for board
elections.
Also, foundation members who have not voted in two board elections
are being removed from the membership now, from what I understand
(we just needed to get to the point where we had two years worth of
board elections in the first place).
Thanks, I lost my mind here and confused the board with the TC.
So then my next question is, of those who did not vote, how many are
from under-represented companies? A higher percentage there might point
to disenfranchisement.
Different but related question (might be hard to calculate though):
If we remove people who have only ever landed one patch from the
electorate, what do the turnout numbers look like? 2? 5?
Do we have the ability to dig in slightly and find a natural definition
or characterization amongst our currently voting electorate that might
help us understand who the people are who do vote and what it is about
those people who might be or feel different or more enfranchised? I've
personally been thinking that the one-patch rule is, while tractable,
potentially strange for turnout - especially when one-patch also gets
you a free summit pass... but I have no data to say what actually
defined "active" in active technical contributor.
Again, the ballots are anonymized so we've no way of doing that analysis.
The best we could IIUC would be to analyze the electoral roll,
bucketizing
by number of patches landed, to see if there's a significant long-tail of
potential voters with very few patches.
Just looking at stackalytices numbers for Juno: Out of 1556 committers,
1071 have committed more than one patch and 485 only a single patch.
That's a third!
Here's the trend over the past four cycles, with a moving average in the
last column, as the eligible voters are derived from the preceding two
cycles:
Release | Committers | Single-patch | 2-cycle MA
------------------------------------------------
Juno | 1556 | 485 (31.2%) | 29.8%
Icehouse| 1273 | 362 (28.4%) | 28.0%
Havana | 1005 | 278 (27.6%) | 28.8%
Folsom | 401 | 120 (29.9%) | 27.9%
Correction, I skipped a cycle in that table:
Release | Committers | Single-patch | 2-cycle MA
------------------------------------------------
Juno | 1556 | 485 (31.2%) | 29.8%
Icehouse| 1273 | 362 (28.4%) | 28.0%
Havana | 1005 | 278 (27.6%) | 28.0%
Grizzly | 630 | 179 (28.4%) | 29.2%
Folsom | 401 | 120 (29.9%) | 27.9%
Doesn't alter the trend though, still quite flat with some jitter and
a small uptick.
The low (and dropping) level of turnout is worrying, particularly in
light of that analysis showing the proportion of drive-by contributors
is relatively static, but it is always going to be hard to discern the
motives of people who didn't vote from the single bit of data we have on
them.
There is, however, another metric that we can pull from the actual
voting data: the number of candidates actually ranked by each voter:
Candidates
ranked Frequency
0 8 2%
1 17 3%
2 24 5%
3 20 4%
4 31 6%
5 36 7%
6 68 13%
7 39 8%
8 17 3%
9 9 2%
10 21 4%
11 - -
12 216 43%
(Note that it isn't possible to rank exactly n-1 candidates.)
So even amongst the group of people who were engaged enough to vote,
fewer than half ranked all of the candidates. A couple of hypotheses
spring to mind:
1) People don't understand the voting system.
Under Condorcet, there is no such thing as tactical voting by an
individual. So to the extent that these figures might reflect deliberate
'tactical' voting, it means people don't understand Condorcet. The size
of the spike at 6 (the number of positions available - the same spike
appeared at 7 in the previous election) strongly suggests that lack of
understanding of the voting system is at least part of the story. The
good news is that this problem is eminently addressable.
2) People aren't familiar with the candidates
This is the one that worries me - it looks a lot like most voters are
choosing not to rank many of the candidates because they don't feel they
know enough about them to have an opinion. It seems to me that the TC
has failed to engage the community enough on the issues of the day to
move beyond elections as a simple name-recognition contest. (Kind of
like how I imagine it is when you have to vote for your local
dog-catcher here in the US. I have to imagine because they don't let me
vote.) It gets worse, because the less the TC tries to engage the
community on the issues and the less it attempts to actually lead (as
opposed to just considering checklists and voting to ask for more time
to consider checklists), the more entrenched the current revolving-door
membership becomes. So every election serves to reinforce the TC
members' perception that everything is going great, and also to
reinforce the perception of those whose views are not represented that
the TC is an echo chamber from which their views are more or less
structurally excluded. That's a much harder problem to address.
cheers,
Zane.
Cheers,
Eoghan
So the proportion of single-patch committers is creeping up slowly, but
not at a rate that would account for the decline in voter turnout.
And since we've no way of knowing if voting patterns among the single-patch
committers differs in any way from the norm, these data don't tell us much.
If we're serious about improving participation rates, then I think we
should consider factors what would tend to drive interest levels and
excitement around election time. My own suspicion is that open races
where the outcome is in doubt are more likely to garner attention from
voters, than contests that feel like a foregone conclusion. That would
suggest un-staggering the terms as a first step.
Cheers,
Eoghan
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