Off the top of my head, I can think of two possibilities. One is we open a new topic here on Discourse and make it a wiki post so anyone can edit it and add a nominee’s name to the list. I believe the ACL on the topic itself will keep it to just core devs which is really the only restriction on nominations.
The other option is we add a list to the voters repo. That will also have the correct ACL for restricting nominations to only come from core developers, but the burden is potentially higher (although that depends on your view of Discourse ). My personal preference is to use Discourse to keep it simple.
Either way I think it would be helpful to have a habit of opening a new topic here for anyone who is nominated so any relevant info about the nominee can be shared and easily linked to as well as centralize any questions/comments about the nominee. We can add a new council tag or something here on Discourse to help collect/track such posts (I also expect we will end up prefixing all the topic titles with something like Council nomination: Brett Cannon or something to also help facilitate discovery). If we get into the habit with this it also means we can link the nominee’s name in the wiki/repo post to make it easier for people to find info an a specific nominee.
It might be helpful to think of it as two problems: how to handle the discussion in general, and how to make sure that when January 17 arrives, @EWDurbin has a complete list of nominees so he can send out ballots. For the latter, I think any kind of editable wiki/repo/whatever will work, though it’d be nice if all core team members have update rights so the burden of keeping it up to date doesn’t fall on just one person. OTOH a “nomination” tag probably doesn’t solve this by itself, because it still leaves @EWDurbin with the job of combing through all the threads under that tag to find nominations.
For the discussion itself, a tag is probably a good idea. I’d also like to suggest that maybe we should start trying to move discussions out of the committers-only area when we can? Obviously only committers will be voting in the end, but there are lots of non-committers who might have useful thoughts, and it’s possible that some of the nominees won’t be committers either…
I believe both of my suggestions should cover that as I agree the nomination process should be as self-serve as possible. So we seem to be in agreement on this point.
I actually meant for the tag to just be to help surface the discussions, not to play an official role in declaring a nominee. So still in agreement.
Very true, so we probably can’t avoid public volume on this if it happens to come up.
Here’s a third possibility that just occurred to me: make a PEP for each election, that records the returns officer, dates, nominees as they arrive, and eventually results. Sort of similar to the PEPs we have for each release, like PEP 537 or PEP 569. What do you think?
That sounds ok to me, but I also think people shouldn’t need to edit a PEP just to nominate someone. In other words, someone has to be responsible for maintaining the PEP, in addition to the regular discussions that happen in the more informal channels.
The point of nominating is to make screen out nuisance candidates by making sure that at least one core team member thinks you’d be a good council member. Of course if you are a core team member then this is a very easy bar to clear – you can just nominate yourself, no big deal :-). But if someone who isn’t a core team member wants to run, then they have to convince a core team member to nominate them.
It’s entirely possible we’ll never have any external candidates and the whole formal nomination thing will be a no-op in practice. We only included the option in the first place because Steve was worried that we wouldn’t be able to find 5 core team members willing to volunteer :-). We’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Yes, this too (as well as a way to filter externals). Many people won’t presume to self-nominate, but would be willing if asked and explicitly/publicly supported by someone else.
The nominator will also have a big impact on the nominee’s acceptability, because that’s just how people and politics work. (For example, I’d poll much better if Guido nominated me than if I self-nominated.)
Why do you think editing a PEP through GitHub’s UI is too burdensome? I personally have no objection if someone says, “can someone please add XXX to the PEP for me?”, but I would argue that if you aren’t willing to edit a PEP yourself to nominate someone then how serious are you about the candidate?
IOW I personally would like to distribute the load among all of us for this election (and future elections) rather than burden a single person with having to track all the possible places people might nominate someone.
FYI I have split off the discussion about whether external nominees are a good thing and the discussion about how to get enough nominees to have choice into separate topics so this topic can stay focused on the mechanics of how to collect nominations.
). My personal preference is to use Discourse to keep it simple.
