Input Required: TOC election

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For this year’s TOC elections, we chose a different service for managing the election, RANKEDVOTE. While we think it is still a good choice, there were some bumps in the road along the way. As a result, we asked voters to vote multiple times to ensure we had legitimate results and could ensure that only folks who were properly qualified and registered voted.

Thanks for your participation and your patience.

We have now concluded the final tallying of the votes, but unfortunately there is another issue to overcome.

The issue is that in the second round of voting, no votes were submitted in the category of “Users/Learners.” As a result a candidate cannot be selected from this category.

In the category of Instructors, we have a winner.

In order to choose the third TOC member, I recommend that we select the winner and the finalist from the Core Contributors & Maintainers category. That category had many times more voters than the Instructor category. The finalist will become the User/Learner representative.

If you have any objections to this proposal or counter proposals, please respond to this thread by Friday 11/17.

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I approve of this

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I’d like to make a counter-proposal: that the Users/Learners candidate be elected from the aggregated votes of all voters – thus: both Core contributors/Maintainers and Instructors. This would have the following benefits:

  • To make the winner more representative of all voters.
  • To decrease the importance of the cc/maintainers group, which is strongly biased towards a few major companies.
  • To increase the impact of the Instructors category, which does not otherwise interact much with the rest of the community.

Disclaimer: I’m a candidate in this election. Thus it wouldn’t really make sense for me to interfere in the winner selection process. Which is why I’m not voting for my own proposal, but I’m submitting it to the community for discussion.

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I like the idea of using all the votes rather than just the CC votes but how feasible is that mechanically in the tools we’re using this time around? If possible to do, I vote for this but otherwise I’m okay with Ed’s original proposal.

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The instructor category had a small number of votes. Given that, I’m not sure how valuable it would be to export the data from the tool in order to run the election ourselves. If there’s a strong preference for that approach, we can consider it, but I don’t expect it to change the outcome given the relatives sizes of the constituencies.

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@e0d Thanks for checking on this! I’m fine with any of the options suggested in this thread.

Also something to note, which might help to decide: from what @Eden_Huthmacher mentioned, the core contributors voters category also contain some of the voters from the users category this year (ie the ones listed as “operators” on the list of voters) - so it ends up being a mixed category this year in any case.

It might also be worth checking with the voters registered in the “users” category why they didn’t vote (or re-vote?) - there are quite a few in the list, so they might have had an issue.

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I also like the idea of using all the votes. However exporting raw data and running the election manually seems like a tall order. I would approve of using only the CC & maintainers data if there is good reason to believe that using the whole dataset won’t make it significantly more representative.

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Hello. I think the more votes can be included as a replacement for this category, the better. However, since I’m directly involved as a cantidate, I recuse from the decision and accept what gets decided.

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All, given the feedback, I have taken the steps to combine the data sets.

So, the final winners was determined using:

  1. The instructor winner from the set of instructors voting.
  2. The core contributor and learner winner from the top two candidates selected by a combined data set including both instructors and core contributors.

As a reminder, 0 votes were cast by learners.

I have the final results which I will share with the TOC for verification. We’ll target announcing the results on November 27th, one week from today.

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awiting the news… :slight_smile:

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We’ve discovered another issue at play here. Here’s the summary – this will be a blog post as well for better reach. The TOC have discussed and there’s agreement to move forward with a new plan.

Blog Post

For this year’s TOC elections, we’ve experienced a couple bumps in the road already. My apologies for that. Unfortunately, we’ve encountered another issue.

While auditing the voting data we noticed that voter turnout for the Instructor and Learner categories was very low. In the case of the instructor category, 15% of registered voters voted in the election. In the case of the learner category, 0% – not a typo – voted in the election.

In the course of investigating what might have happened, we discovered that, unrelated to the election, changes were made to Axim’s email configuration to enable enforcement of industry spam reduction best practices, DKIM and DMARC.

However, the system that we use for email campaigns was not added to the domain allow list. As a result, emails to voters were redirected to spam folders or quarantined.

You may have an email related to the election in your spam folder with the tell tale header:

DMARC: ‘FAIL’

We had originally considered electing two representatives from the Core Contributor category, but given the extremely low turn out and this new information, we are going to reopen voting for one (1) week starting on Dec 4, 2023.

If you have already voted, there’s nothing to do. Your vote is secure and will be counted.

For those who registered, but have not yet voted, we will email you instructions now that we have corrected the DMARC configuration issue.

I want to take the opportunity to apologize again for the messiness of this process. We’ve learned quite a lot and am confident that we have plans in place to prevent a recurrence of any of the issues that we saw during this election. We very much value your participation, please take a few minutes to register your vote for the excellent slate of candidates running this year.

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