Jenkins : Board Election Process

Created by Unknown User (kohsuke), last modified by Olivier Vernin on Sep 13, 2019

This document outlines the Governance Board election process as discussed in governance meetings:

And agreed upon in the meeting on:

The charter of the Jenkins board is to ensure the health of not only the software project, but of the communities of plugin developers and users. To do this effectively, members of the board must bring various perspectives to the table: what are the needs of users; of committers; of organizations, both large and small; of commercial interests. As the composition of the Jenkins board changes over time, we want to ensure that this balance of viewpoints is maintained. Current board members best understand this balance, and so are in the best position to select candidates for inclusion onto the board. A board comprised fully of write-in candidates runs the risk of being overweighed with one type of perspective over all others.

The opinion of members of the community at large is highly valued, and the board welcomes additional nominations beyond who we might consider. If you feel that a particular person is well suited to help guide Jenkins, please submit a name and the reason for your nomination to jenkinsci-board at googlegroups dot com. The current members of the board will review all submissions and compile a final list of candidates to be voted on by the community, for the seats up for election. The board reserves the right to leave nominations off the final ballot if they feel that a particular viewpoint is already well represented on the board.

Goal

  1. Make sure that the board reflects "the will of project participants" instead of just being self-appointed.
  2. Make sure that the board reflects the balance of different viewpoints — the needs of users; of committers; of organizations, both large and small; of commercial interests.
  3. Maintain stability and avoid sudden direction changes.

Process

  1. Expand the board from 3 people to 5 people; Unknown User (kohsuke) holding a permanent board seat until such a time he decides to resign.
  2. Have election every year, electing 2 people in each year (that means the term is 2 years, without term limit: you can be candidate and be re-elected indefinitely)
  3. There'll be a period of 3 weeks designated for the board to encourage the community to send in the nominations. The board will meet in private to come up with the list of candidates at the end
  4. Any company should not dominate in the board (see below)
    • The number of board members affiliated with one company must be less than 50%
    • If a board member gets employed by a company and the limitation gets violated, somebody must step down and the board will follow the #Interim Procedures
  5. Use Condorcet Internet Voting Service as the algorithm to elect multiple people in one vote.
  6. You earn the voting right by having an account on jenkins-ci.org prior to the last election. (to avoid last minute rush since we have few other criteria for voters.) For the first election, we will create the election cut-off based on the date when this proposal is ratified.

Interim Procedures

  1. If a board member resigns, the board is allowed to appoint an interim board member to fulfill the remainder of the term, subject to blessing in a regularly governance meeting.

Corporate Involvement

As an independent community, it is important to us that the Jenkins board does not become overly influenced by any one single corporate entity (more on our philosophy can be found in the Governance Document).

To handle this within the election cycle, we do not wish to limit the candidacy for employees of any given company:

  • Initially, number of candidates (or permanent seats) per company is ignored and candidates are eliminated as per normal.
  • Winners are calculated. If a company is over quota, including permanent seats, we take any permanent seats from that company, and the top zero, one or two candidates from that company, depending on how many permanent seats are held by affiliates of that company, and all the other candidates that aren't affiliated with that company, dropping the third, fourth, etc... placing candidates who are affiliated with that company.
  • Then re-run the calculation with the new pool.

Corporate Disclosure

Like many things in the Jenkins community, the disclosure of corporate affiliation is based on the honor system. With major multi-national corporations, such as Amazon, which have hundreds of affiliate companies we ask that candidates also disclose/mention any pertinent subsidiary relationship (e.g. "A9, an Amazon subsidiary").

Motivations

There are several motivations behind the above proposal:

  1. Odd number of people prevents the tie problem
  2. Given the low bar to the committership, we couldn't really come up with any criteria to decide who has the voting right. At the same time, we did want to restrict who can vote (as opposed to anyone unrelated to the project) for the stability.