Important: Affirm your PSF Membership voting status

EWDurbin · June 7, 2023, 6:56pm

Every PSF Voting Member (Supporting, Managing, Contributing, and Fellow) needs to affirm their membership in order to vote in this year’s election.

This year’s Board Election begins June 20th, and voter eligibility cut-off is June 15th. You should have received an email with instructions and you need to affirm your voting rights before June 15th in order to participate in this year’s Board Election. Email will be from “psf@psfmember.org” with subject “[Action Required] Affirm your PSF Membership voting status”.

If you didn’t get an email inviting you to, “Affirm your PSF Membership voting status” and you were expecting to, please write to us at psf-donations at python.org and we’ll help you sort it out

Why you are being asked to do this:

Section 4.2 of the PSF Bylaws requires that “Members of any membership class with voting rights must affirm each year to the corporation in writing that such member intends to be a voting member for such year.”

The PSF has not enforced this in the past, because it was technically challenging to do so. Now that our voting membership has been completely consolidated into psfmember.org, we are able to do so.

Our motivation is to ensure that our elections can meet quorum as required by Section 3.9 of our bylaws. As our membership has grown we have seen that and increasing number of Contributing, Managing, and Fellow members with indefinite membership do not engage with our annual election, making quorum difficult to reach.

You can see your membership record and status on psfmember.org. If you are a voting-eligible member and do not already have a login there, please sign up and then email psf-donations@python.org so we can link your membership to your account. You can click the emailed link to re-certify without signing in. But please create your account and ensure it is linked to your membership so that we can ensure we have the most up-to-date contact information for you in the future.

What happens next? You’ll get an email from OpaVote with a ballot on or before June 20th and then you can vote!

Learn more about membership here or if you have questions about membership or nominations please email psf-elections@python.org. In addition to Slack you are welcome to join the discussion about the PSF Board election on our forum.

davidism · June 7, 2023, 8:20pm

For affirming voting status, is it enough to simply log in to the psfmember.org site? I don’t see a way to “affirm” once I’ve logged in. There’s a link in the email to “click here to affirm without logging in”, but it’s also encouraging people to sign up instead of using that link.

If I do click the link, it wants me to affirm that I’m a contributing member, but presumably being a fellow should take priority?

CAM-Gerlach · June 7, 2023, 8:22pm

I was a bit confused, sorry—this “PSF Member” is account separate from the account we have to log in to at https://www.python.org/accounts/login/ in order to sign up as a PSF member, right? To a user it sounds like it should be the same thing, but I’m assuming its not given the different sites and the fact that my credentials for the latter didn’t seem to work for the former (and now, looking closer, at the message after I log in to the latter account and then visit the indicated page).

It might be good to clarify this further in the messaging, since it seems like there’s some potential for confusion here (unless I’m just dumb, which is entirely possible, hehe).

guido · June 7, 2023, 8:44pm

I am also confused. I managed to confirm my voting status using the “anonymous” link from the email I received, but logging in failed, requesting a password didn’t produce a reminder email, and registering as a new user worked but didn’t show any membership status records. I suspect there are now at least two users for guido@python.org. Not good.

EWDurbin · June 7, 2023, 10:45pm

The link is Voting Affirmation – Python Software Foundation once logged in.

I know it’s unwieldily but it’s what we have. We tried to get this exposed on the user dashboard and failed to update copy before send (we had a lot of headaches with CiviCRM and it got lost in the shuffle).

Edit: This is also why we included the direct pre-auth’d link, along with the fact that many member records do not have associated accounts on psfmember.org

EWDurbin · June 7, 2023, 10:47pm

Correct, psfmember.org is an entirely separate stack with its own database (CiviCRM).

Hence why we call out “if you do not have an account there”.

The link you sent for membership tries to clarify for people who go there as well.

EWDurbin · June 7, 2023, 10:48pm

No, there are not two users. There is a contact for you based on membership records.

That is why we ask:

EWDurbin · June 8, 2023, 6:36pm

Update, psfmember.org homepage is buffed up a bit to provide helpful links after login.

CAM-Gerlach · June 9, 2023, 4:29am

FWIW, when I visit the psfmember.org homepage while logged in, all I see is some text and a button (with a gradient that makes it rather low-contrast and likely not very a11y-friendly) for joining the PSF as a Supporting Member. I had to browse through my emails to find the direct URL to the page to confirm my membership. Seems like it might be a good idea to add a link to that to the homepage?

Screenshot

EWDurbin · June 9, 2023, 9:27am

Your record has multiple conflicting memberships due to the recent resubmission on June 5 for contributing/managing that interfered with the CiviCRM/WordPress interface that sets the content. That’s resolved.

EWDurbin · June 9, 2023, 9:30am

And to be clear we are asking you to affirm voting intention, not your membership.

CAM-Gerlach · June 9, 2023, 7:03pm

Oh, sorry about messing things up! Was there something specific I should have done instead?

Right; sorry for the lack of clarity—what I was referring to there was from the psfmember.org homepage, I couldn’t find any link to actually see my membership details to confirm that my PSF membership had been linked to my psfmember.org account, per the instructions regarding that in your original post. Thanks to your recent work to add those links to the homepage, that has now been resolved, thanks!

d_n · June 11, 2023, 8:52pm

Thanks for pointing-out PSF Membership. I joined years ago (>15), but have never really worried about ‘being a member’ - and until more-recently, wouldn’t have recognised names/been competent to vote. Thus, have upgraded membership, and then forwarded application to be a Contributor/PUG-leader. Noted that Google submission-response* mentioned 1 May deadline for folk wanting to register AND participate in this year’s election, ie too late. (story of my life!)

mentioned on the web-page, not repeated in the email-confirmation.

EWDurbin · June 11, 2023, 9:08pm

Hi @d_n and welcome “back”. Your submission via that form will be valid for this years election after being reviewed and approved. You’ll get an email to ask to affirm voting intention after that (likely June 16th).

We’re deprecating it after this years election specifically since it was created by a past director in their personal google account and we cannot update it.

d_n · June 11, 2023, 9:21pm

After a colleague gave me a ‘get with the program[me]’ prod, I was a bit surprised to be told ‘too late’!
Thanks for all the good work!

jugmac00 · June 15, 2023, 6:16am

Some feedback

the link in the “[Action Required]” email “psf-donations@python.org” falsly links to https://psfmember.org/civicrm/mailing/url/?u=11&qid=936
when I visit the psfmember site via one of the provided links (sorry, cannot remember which one I clicked), I receive an error, see attached screenshot

my biggest issue or concern about this process however is the fact that we were only given one week to react to that email - it happens to be that I was on holiday and just came back and checked the email today, on June 15th, the last day of the deadline; imho 4-6 weeks would be more appropriate

Other than that… thanks for all the work!

EWDurbin · June 15, 2023, 7:15am

That’s the CiviCRM mailing system being “helpful” to track click throughs, the link does resolve to “mailto:psf-donations@python.org”.

The lede is buried there, look more closely to see that it is telling you you are not logged in, which is necessary for displaying the contents of the page.

No disagreement here, but we’re working with the timeline and systems we have available. There were delays in getting this mailing out together due to the membership systems consolidation, but it is more important this year more than ever to enforce this aspect of the bylaws due to the growth of “silent” indefinite memberships risking our ability to meet quorum.

malemburg · June 15, 2023, 8:26am

Here’s a step-by-step guide for getting to the right screen to enter your choice:

Go to the psfmember.org login screen: https://psfmember.org/wp-login.php (you can find the link on the home page at the bottom)

Enter your login details or register, if you don’t have a login yet.

On the account page, click on the link to the affirmation page:

On the affirmation page, make your choice and click “Submit”:

That’s all.

The website is not necessarily the most intuitive, but it does work Perhaps we could do a workshop to help make it more user friendly.

jugmac00 · June 17, 2023, 5:26pm

As an addition to @malemburg’s instruction… the state of your choice is not shown after the vote. So if you voted and you go back to that site, you are presented the same form again.

d_n · June 20, 2023, 4:54am

Marc-André, please let me know if/when. Happy to help if I can…