Finding a new administrator for Steering Council elections

[EWDurbin (Ee Durbin)]

@Mariatta

What access rights is needed in order to administer the election? Does it need to be someone very close to the PSF. eg infrastructure team member, PSF staff? can any PSF member do this? Can anyone in the world do this?

To manage permissions, topics, and moderate the Steering Council Nominations subcategory in order to manage who can post what/when to open/close elections and replies, announce election progress, and manage visibility of old messages to avoid confusion.

And access to python/voters private repository to generate and maintain the voter roll for the election.

@Mariatta

• Does it require certain technical skills? If so, what are the skills needed?

Familiarity with Python, toml, git, and GitHub are good, but not strictly necessary to maintain and generate the voter-roll via python/voters.

@Mariatta

What access does the election administrator have? From what I see, the administrator have access to personal information like the voters list and their email addresses. Anything else?

The election administrator can also see who has cast ballots, but not what those ballots contain.

@Mariatta

Is there a requirement of who can/cannot be an administrator? I’m assuming people planning to run in the election should not be administering it. What about the voters themselves?

This is a decision for the Steering Council and Core Developers.

@Mariatta

Also I assume this will be a volunteer role, right?

This is a decision for the Steering Council and Core Developers.

@tim.one

it would be good to hear an estimate of the time commitment required

Overall, approximately 12-16 hours over the course of a couple months (note many links will be inaccessible to non core devs as they go to the private psf/voters repo:

• Preparation of the PEP specifying the election, see examples from past years.
• Generate initial voter roll based on python/voters see examples from past years
• Send notifications to core developers who would be marked as inactive an ineligible to vote based on python/voters tooling.
• Announce the opening of the nominations period and set permissions on the subcategory to allow core developers to create new topics and anyone to reply, see examples from past years
• Moderate new topics and replies to the Steering Council Nominations subcategory
• Announce the closing of the nominations period and set permissions to disallow new topics examples from last years
• Prepare an update to psf/voters with responses from inactive Core Developers, see examples from past years
• Update permissions on the Steering Council subcategory to disallow replies
• Update the PEP with nominations, see examples from past years
• Open the election! configure the election as described in the PEP, upload voter roll, and send email notifications.
• Announce that the election has started, see examples from past years.
• Monitor for core developers who expect a ballot, but did not receive one. Notify Steering Council of any situations where a core developer has concerns that they are ineligible.
• Close the election, audit for conflicts of interest per PEP 13 regarding composition of the newly elected SC.
• Announce the results, see examples from past years
• Update the PEP with the results, see examples from past years

Along with any other number of small things…