Hey Christian,apologize if we never resumed the whole issue on the list, so I'm happy to add some more things to your questions and Giannis' reply (inline)
2017-02-16 13:02 GMT+01:00 Giannis Konstantinidis <giannis@konstantinidis.cc>:
Hey Christian,
thanks for reaching out, first of all.
On February 16, 2017 at 1:10 PM Christian Dersch <chrisdersch@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi ambassadors,
while reading the meeting log and some more stuff (like FAmSCo ticket on vacant seat) I got more and more upset. The issue with the last election is a serious one, but some people here "discuss" on preschool level… I don't call any names here but encourage everyone to read the logs and build an own opinion. Please don't forget the four Fedora foundations, one of them is "Friends"! Fedora is a friendly and transparent community, not a kindergarten… It makes me angry, that is such an important topic.As you can realise, this is has been a very unique situation. I don't recall having dealt with something similar in the past.
There have been a series of "mistakes" that took place:
- Fredlima may have run for FAmSCo while not belonging to any ambassadors group on FAS, however the FAmSCo election rules[0] are not clear enough. Is is stated that "Candidates may be any member of the ambassadors group in the Fedora Accounts System". Note the use of the word "may", which suggests possibility rather than obligation.
- The elections system[1] allowed fredlima to run for FAmSCo normally, without any restrictions system-wise.
- There has been conducted no eligibility check for candidates running for FAmSCo.
I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here, I'm merely trying to provide everyone with some background information. Mistakes can happen and we should definitely make sure to prevent similar issues in the future.
On the vacant seat topic I have some thoughts (I'm still not sure what the proposed solution is, finally, so maybe my thoughts are not up to date. Please correct me if I'm wrong):
* fredlima should not have been a candidate for formal reasons. But it happened and we cannot change this. Note that this is a *purely* formal argument, I don't know fredlima and he might be a very good FAmSCo member as many community members voted for him. So this is *really* nothing personal here.
Correct, the rules don't allow nominating non ambassadors, but it happened and we cannot change this.
* I see that other candidate(s) are upset because they might have been in FAmSCo when the election would have been correct. gnokii might be the first candidate as he got the most votes of the people who didn't get into new FAmSCo, but it is hard to say how the distribution of votes would have been without fredlima. So I consider all remaining candidates.
Also perfectly fine, we really don't know how votes would have been without fredlima.
* On the other hand people who voted for fredlima might be upset too… I don't know why he was not an ambassador right now and how long he is an "informal ambassador" now. But people voted for him and this must have a reason, so completely ignoring would be a bad idea too…
This is related to the point before, so +1.
* So *IMHO* we need some kind of voting with all candidates for the remaining seat. This includes fredlima, as he is an ambassador now and the many votes for him are another reason to give him the opportunity to be a candidate. But other candidates should get the chance too, as one of them would be in FAmSCo now.
* I dived a bit into the election rules. Is it right that we have no clear rule for such cases (well, a case that should not happen, needs no rule for handling, true…)? The vacant seat stuff seems to be viable for me.
Here you miss an info. We opened a Council ticket [a] to see if the right way would have been to go forward and consider fredlima elected by the community (as you stated before). Council rejected this back to FAmSCo, asking to apply the rules we have for vacant seats [2], and advising FAmSCo to proceed with case #2:
2) If those candidates have been exhausted or FAmSCo does not consider them eligible, FAmSCo will ask Fedora community members that they think would do a good job if they would be willing to hold the open seats.
This rule says FAmSCo can nominate any community member they think would do a good job; at this point it is not more important if this member is an ambassador or not. As you said, there are many people out there who *could* make a very good job, but are not ambassadors because they never applied for it.
* The most important point: Find a transparent and clean solution without any tweaks (like just mentoring fredlima without any further voting, as someone proposed), this is very important for trust!
The clean solution is the one we have above. Fredlima actually is getting his mentorship by a LATAM mentor; but this is NOT related to his (re-) election in FAmSCo.
* Can someone from FAmSCo inform us about the current proposed solution? I have some vague idea, but as there are many discussions, I don't want to write anything wrong or outdated info here.We are applying method #2 of filling vacant seats[2] as mentioned in the FAmSCo election rules. There have been three (3) candidates nominated by FAmSCo members: fredlima and the following two (2) runner-ups, gnokii and mitizie. FAmSCo members are currently voting for their candidate of choice.
* And… Please inform us ambassadors about the topic and all progress! I got the information trough some IRC discussion… From this discussions I know that also some other ambassadors (who are not candidates, so they are "unaffected") are unhappy with that topic.
That's everything for now. And again: Be friends and a friendly community ;)You may track the process by viewing ticket #418[2] on the FAmSCo trac instance.
I hope I have shed some light. I'm currently connecting from an airport, If there's anything I missed or If you have any further questions I will be very happy to get back on the topic later this day. :)
Take care!
-Giannis[0] https://fedoraproject.org/
wiki/FAmSCo_election_rules# Candidates
[1] https://admin.fedoraproject.org/voting/
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAmSCo_election_rules# Filling_Vacant_Seats
[3] https://fedorahosted.org/famsco/ticket/418
FAmSCo already reported back to the Council and all agreed we need to rephrase some rules clarifying them more. Not by adding more rules, we don't want this and consider the Fedora Community a friendly place which would die if we overrule it.If there is anything else we can do for clarifying the process FAmSCo is applying, please askThank you also for bringing this up here ;)[a] https://pagure.io/Fedora-Council/tickets/issue/89
--
Robert Mayr
(robyduck)