Created
August 25, 2012 16:57
A cursory analysis of cumulative voting and its (side) effects in OpenStack elections
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Also known as, why Tristan Goode is on the Foundation Board, while Mark | |
McLoughlin, Dan Wendlandt and Andrew Clay Shafer aren't. | |
(As a preface - I'm delighted that Tristan is going to be on the board. This | |
is in no way any commentary about whom *should* or *shouldn't* be anywhere, | |
simply some observations of the effects of our voting mechanism). | |
I did a quick calculation of the average number of votes cast per voter, for each | |
candidate in the Individual Members Election. (You can see my charts at | |
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av62KoL8f9kAdGh6dGQ2Yjg5dFhXUFFlSFZOZUstUGc). | |
What's interesting in this case, is that there are 7 candidates who had more | |
VOTERS vote for them, than Tristan - who nonetheless did not garner enough votes | |
to secure a seat. Or, to put it another way - most of the board members were | |
elected by a relatively SMALL group of voters, who concentrated their voting | |
power. | |
If I was going to guess, I'd say that Tristan got the Australian vote, in the | |
same way that Yujie and Hui got strongly-concentrated regional votes. Monty | |
Taylor got the HP vote, and Rob Hirshfeld got the Dell vote. | |
Those voters who spread their 8 votes across 8 candidates, are likely totally | |
unrepresented on the board at this point - since no elected director garnered | |
votes from more than roughly 27% of the total voters. | |
Additionally - due to the diversity requirements, three of the most popular | |
candidates (Joseph George, Anne Gentle and Thierry Carrez) will not have | |
director's seats. There's 15.51% of the total votes that therefore have no | |
representation in the board. If the individuals from those organizations had | |
coordinated their nominations, we might see better representation of that missing | |
vote - something that the Condorset system, for instance, would reflect well. | |
To be more explicit about it - more people voted for Anne Gentle (13.85% of | |
voters) and Thierry Carrez (12.35% of voters) than did for Troy Toman (10.8%). | |
But only one of the three of them can take a seat, and Troy had a higher number | |
of votes from each of his voters (3.24 average vs. 2.09 and 1.82 for Anne and | |
Thierry, respectively). | |
The most poignant aspect of this is probably Mark McLoughlin. Again, rampant | |
speculation, but I doubt that Red Hat sent out any sort of internal memo with | |
"suggestions" on these elections. In fact, with their strong sense of "Project | |
Hat" culture, the Red Hat employee members of OpenStack likely voted for a | |
"balanced slate" of candidates. So Mark, with votes from almost half-again as many | |
voters as Tristan, nonetheless does not hold a seat. | |
In OpenStack it is better to be loved fiercely by a few, than broadly liked. | |
All in all, however, I'm happy with the board composition. And I'm confident that | |
the technical committee will end up with the type of representatives that we may | |
miss on the BoD, due to the Condorset voting method used there. |
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