A cursory analysis of cumulative voting and its (side) effects in OpenStack elections

openstack-election-analysis.txt

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.