Organizing the council elections

Thanks all for voting! I am pleased with the turnout and the outcome (though there were several outcomes that I would have liked.)

Now that PEP 816 has won, let’s elect a council. The PEP explains how that should be done in some detail:

A council election consists of two phases:

  • Phase 1: Candidates advertise their interest in serving. Candidates
    must be nominated by a core team member. Self-nominations are
    allowed.

  • Phase 2: Each core team member can vote for zero to five of the
    candidates. Voting is performed anonymously. Candidates are ranked
    by the total number of votes they receive. If a tie occurs, it may
    be resolved by mutual agreement among the candidates, or else the
    winner will be chosen at random.

Each phase lasts one to two weeks, at the outgoing council’s discretion.
For the initial election, both phases will last two weeks.

The election process is managed by a returns officer nominated by the
outgoing steering council. For the initial election, the returns
officer will be nominated by the PSF Executive Director.

The council should ideally reflect the diversity of Python
contributors and users, and core team members are encouraged to vote
accordingly.

All that is pretty clear except for when the first phase should start, and who will run the elections.

I don’t know who the PSF’s Executive Director is (maybe Ewa?) but maybe we could recommend asking Ernest to run the council election, since he’s done a good job with the governance one. I would also ask that the official two-week period start on or after January 6, so we all have some time to relax for the holidays (I know I am going to).

There are also some logistical details, like copying PEP 8016 to PEP 13. (With what modifications? As a draft?) I propose that the winning PEP’s authors handle this.

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I concur about the start date. Let’s take this on fresh in the new year. Spend time with family and relaxing rather than more fretting over Python governance. :slight_smile:

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SInce Ewa is director of operations that’s the closest I can find for an executive director. But I’m sure if we ask with a suggestion of @EWDurbin that we will get Earnest again. :slight_smile: And since the vote is approval voting we can just use Helios.

I personally have no issue if the time for nominations starts January 1 so we can have this all resolved by Feb 1, but if people feel they need to be free for two full weeks for nominations then I say we start no later than January 15 so we can get this done and resolved as this council still has the job of actually figuring out how the project is going to run. :wink:

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Yeah, that language was intended as a fancy way of saying “probably Ernest, but if he can’t do it and for some reason there’s an argument then Ewa’s a good neutral third party to settle it”.

Embarrassingly, it looks like I misremembered her title; Ewa is actually Director of Operations, and there is no ED. Given that none of the voters noticed that the text here is meaningless, I think we can go ahead and fix it.

Sounds good.

Makes sense. The whole process is 4 weeks total, and the first two weeks are just informal discussion + collecting names for the ballot. If we start the clock on Sun Jan 6, then the vote will start Sun Jan 20, and we’ll have a council on Sun Feb 3. If people are eager to get this done ASAP it would probably also be fine to start the discussion period earlier. Either way seems fine to me.

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Sounds good on just fixing Ewa’s title when you copy the PEP to PEP 13. I’ll leave it up to you and @EWDurbin to fix the voting timeline.

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If we wait until the new year then there’s nothing to fix as Ewa was just named Executive Director starting 2019-01-01. :smile:

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So what’s the timeline?

A post was split to a new topic: Vote on possible steering council election timelines