Steering council nominations

I created an elections tag to help track any public announcements of nominations. Posts are going to the Users category so that external candidates are able to make/edit/reply to their own nomination posts.

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I decided to self-select myself to be the test subject for the nomination process, so here’s a post listing my bona fides.

Wrong link?

Since we will have to vote again in the future (at each Python release), maybe the tag should contain a date or something else? Like election2019?

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Yep, copy-and-paste error. Fixed.

Not sure if we want to end up with election-2019, election-2020, election-someone-stepped-down, election-2021, etc. Plus the default sort order is latest so it should be obvious what applies to which election. But if people really want to classify by which election we can (I assume we can edit the label post-creation).

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That makes sense. If there is confusion, we can add a tag into the topic title like [Election 2019] :slight_smile:

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So it turns out all the nominations have been appearing in the “Users” category, which I have muted to avoid the noise. But now there’s literally no way for me to get to that category through the UI (when I get a direct link it works, and then I can view the category, but not through the normal views and certainly not from my phone).

If this is the process, I’m now strongly in favour of creating a new category. I had assumed they would come to committers, since only committers can nominate candidates (and we would temporarily add nominees to the committers group to be able to answer questions).

Yeah I had the same problem. I’ve unmuted the “users” category for the time being during the election. It can be done through the settings on the web, but I don’t know if you can do it from an app/phone.

Oh whoa, I’d missed all those too, and was wondering why no-one was nominating (but too busy the last few days look into it :-)).

The mailing lists have been split into users/dev/committers for decades. Why don’t we have a dev category here?

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I think whether there should be a dev category is still discussed here Where is the python-dev category?

That’s slightly ironic as it was your idea to make the posts in a publicly accessible location for external candidates to be able to reply to their own nomination posts. :slight_smile:

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Nominations might come from only core devs, but since we can have external candidates the posts need to be publicly accessible so those external candidates can reply to questions. And since I personally didn’t want to give myself some odd advantage from posting to just Committers I posted in Users and everyone else seems to have followed suit. But this is also why I added the tag as you can just visit there to find the posts.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, for all the other kinds of posts), the category is still filtered out. It seems nothing can override the mute option besides a direct link to the post.

Perhaps this is a point of feedback for Discourse, but in the meantime I hope we get a category for -dev rather than only -list.

Luckily all the candidates have been linking from PEP 8100 to their announcement topic, so that should fix it for you.

Discourse Feedback - Discussions on Python.org for feedback.

Can I suggest that people should include their employer when announcing their candidacy? Some have, but not all, and as there’s a restriction to 2 council members from any one company, it’s important information for voters (putting 3 people who work for the same employer at the top of your list essentially guarantees that one of your choices will be disqualified).

It may even be worth adding employer to PEP 8100.

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I like the idea of adding the information to the PEP 8100.

Just to somewhat allay people’s worry that we need to track this, I believe there are only 4 companies that have more than 2 core devs on staff (w/ their current nomination count in parentheses):

  1. Dropbox (1)
  2. IBM/Red Hat (1)
  3. Google (0)
  4. Microsoft (2)

So those of us at Microsoft are the only ones who potentially need to make sure people are aware that there is an employer limit issue ATM and that has not occurred (and I’m not sure if it even will).

IOW I’m fine with someone going around and asking candidates who their employers are and updating the PEP accordingly, but I’m personally not worried enough to do it myself until such a thing occurs and even then we can keep it to just those people causing the clash.

Cool - that certainly alleviates my concern. It was the MS/LinkedIn link that surprised me, and made me conscious of this.

Personally, I wasn’t that bothered by the whole question of conflict of interest raised in PEP 8016. My worry here was the converse - that we’d have to lose good council members over (probably unfounded) concerns about conflict of interest. So it’s good to know that’s not a problem.

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That should be (2) – both Benjamin and I work at Dropbox (Benjamin even mentioned his desk is across from mine :-). Though I very much doubt that either of us is going to be biased towards what Dropbox wants from Python, if we’re elected. Its more the other way around (Dropbox likes to have our Python expertise on hand).

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