Electing the openSUSE board

The openSUSE project takes another step in becoming a true community project. The current openSUSE board, appointed by Novell, will soon be replaced by an elected board. The question that is being debated on the opensuse-project mailing list is "Who can vote for the openSUSE board?"

Among the openSUSE community there are Members and a larger number of Users. ""openSUSE Members" are specifically distinguished contributors who have brought a continued and substantial contribution to the openSUSE project. They are approved by the openSUSE board." Becoming a user is as easy as registering on the wiki.

Some possible answers to the "who can vote" question include:

• members only
• anyone (members + registered users)
• members + non-members vouched for by members
• members + users who have signed the Guiding Principles

At this time the number of members is low. There are concerns that having members (who are appointed by the board) as the only voters for the board could exclude the greater community. On the other hand opening up elections to the greater user community is difficult to police. It should be verifiable that those who are eligible to vote have only one vote counted. Other projects may serve as a guide for this issue.

Debian has the Debian Voting Information page which defines how voting is done and how votes are counted. Debian restricts voting to Debian Developers (DDs), who much sign their vote with their key which is also on the official keyring. DDs may vote more than once, but only the last vote is counted, so voting is restricted and it's easy to insure one-vote-per-person.

The Fedora project has defined Fedora Board Elections more recently than Debian. This document states that 5 of 9 seats on the board are appointed by the board. Voting is open for the remaining seats to those who have a valid account in the Fedora Account System. Getting an account on the Fedora Account System requires an application and approval process that is somewhat similar to becoming an openSUSE Member.

The GNOME Foundation Elections process was also raised as a model. GNOME membership is open to any contributor willing to go through the application process.

Given those three examples it does seem that voting privileges are typically restricted to a subset of the community that has made both a commitment and continuing contributions to the project. The main difference is that openSUSE membership is relatively new and is therefore a small segment of the greater community. Over time the membership will grow and members only elections may become more appealing. In any case, the procedures that are defined for this election may be changed for subsequent elections.

---

(Log in to post comments)

The (somewhat similar) strategy used by Gentoo is to allow anyone who's been a developer for
at least a year to vote. That also includes any former developers. I do like the idea of
something a bit less arbitrary though, because a year's development means very different
things to different people.