TL;DR: how about we adopt a "soft enforcement" model, relying on sound judgement and good faith within the community?
Hi Folks, I'm concerned that the "expected election behaviour" review[1] is not converging on the optimal approach, partially due to the initial concentration on the procedural aspects of the proposal. This concentration was natural enough, due to shortcomings such as the lack of any provision for a right of reply, or the fuzziness around who was capable of deciding a violation had occurred and imposing the stiff penalties envisaged. However, I think we should take a step back at this stage and reconsider the whole approach. Looking at this in the round, as I see it, the approach mooted seems to suffer from a fundamental flaw. Specifically, in holding individuals to the community code of conduct[2] in a very *strict* sense (under pain of severe career damage), when much of that code is written in an aspirational style, and so is not very suitable for use as an *objective* standard. The reference to "the spirit of the OpenStack ideals" ideals is even more problematic in that sense. Ideals by their nature are *idealized* versions of reality. So IMHO it's not workable to infuse an aspiration to meet these laudable ideals, with the language of abuse, violations, investigation, punishment etc. In fact it strikes me as a tad Orwellian to do so. So I wanted to throw an alternative idea out onto the table ... How about we rely instead on the values and attributes that actually make our community strong? Specifically: maturity, honesty, and a self-correcting nature. How about we simply require that each candidate for a TC or PTL election gives a simple undertaking in their self-nomination mail, along the lines of: "I undertake to respect the election process, as required by the community code of conduct. I also undertake not to engage in campaign practices that the community has considered objectionable in the past, including but not limited to, unsolicited mail shots and private campaign events. If my behavior during this election period does not live up to those standards, please feel free to call me out on it on this mailing list and/or withhold your vote." We then rely on: (a) the self-policing nature of an honest, open community and: (b) the maturity and sound judgement within that community giving us the ability to quickly spot and disregard any frivolous reports of mis-behavior So no need for heavy-weight inquisitions, no need to interrupt the election process, no need for handing out of stiff penalties such as termination of membership. Instead, we simply rely on good faith and sound judgement within the community. TBH I think we're pretty good at making ourselves heard when needs be, and also pretty good at filtering through the noise. So I would trust the electorate to apply their judgement, filter out those reports of bad practice that they consider frivolous or tending to make mischief, or conversely to withhold their vote if they consider the practice reported to be unacceptable. If someone has already cast their vote when the report of some questionable behavior surfaces, well so be it. The electorate has a long memory and most successful candidates end up running again for subsequent elections (e.g. a follow-on term as PTL, or for the TC). The key strength of this alternative approach IMO is that it directly relies on the *actual* values of the community, as opposed to attempting to codify those values, a priori. Just my $0.02 ... Cheers, Eoghan [1] https://review.openstack.org/98675 [2] http://www.openstack.org/legal/community-code-of-conduct _______________________________________________ OpenStack-dev mailing list OpenStack-dev@lists.openstack.org http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev