Re: 2016 SPI board elections

Greetings to all, and in particular to those I have not had the chance
to collaborate with yet.
Yesterday I became a SPI member, apparently thanks to Martin
Zobel-Helas, just in time for the 2016 SPI board elections, in which I
was able to vote.

Position statements

Joshua D. Drake

Just one comment on a specific statement, Joshua's. It contains:
> Getting business items in order such as proper insurance and
> professional services.

What this means is vague for me (I fail to see what "business items"
means concretely).

General

Most statements say a lot more about what one has done than about what
one intends to do. There's still one easy information about who
candidates are which is usually missing : their age.

My vote

I had never heard about half of the candidates. I read all of the
platforms, but many candidatures were difficult for me to compare. I
ordered the candidates this way:
> Jimmy Kaplowitz
> -
> Luca Filipozzi
> Craig Small
> Martin Zobel-Helas
> -
> Valerie Young
> Peter Eisentraut
> Tim Potter
> Stephen Frost
> -
> Andrew Tridgell
> R. Tyler Croy
> Philip Balister
> Joshua D. Drake
> Joerg Jaspert

I put dashes between candidates who left me significantly different
impressions. A candidate above a certain dashed line seemed more
preferable to me than one below that same line.
Since I could not express indifference between 2 candidates and express
a preference between those candidates and others at the same time, I
ranked some candidates randomly. The result follows:

> Your vote will be kept confidential. To make it possible for you to
> verify that your vote was counted it will be associated with a secret
> cookie in the result:
>
> |0259f9f5fc582feb6b85db2d377a239b HEJMLDIFKBACG|
>

I ranked candidates based on what their statements said about their
achievements, their goals, and my prior perception of them. Being a
long-time Debian developer, my ranking surely shows some bias. I was
hoping for commitments to transparency but did not read much on that.

I have had positive interactions with Martin, who recently showed
concern for transparency. As it took more than a year for my own
application to be processed, I liked Jimmy's statement because it
mentioned there was a problem with delays (although it did not
specifically mention membership delays).

Most candidates have an impressive background. There was a single
candidate I considered putting below "None of the Above"... but there
was no NOTA anyway. Thanks to all those offering themselves.

Voting issue

After entering my ranking, I clicked the "Cast Vote" button. I was not
expecting this to fail and therefore did not pay huge attention, but it
seems it failed. I believe the same page reloaded. What I had entered in
the field was not lost. After I clicked the button a second time, my
vote was successfully cast.

As I was not extremely attentive, there may be a ~ 1% chance I did not
properly click the button. This does not mean there was a server-side
issue, but the client was Firefox 45 on Windows 10, which is really
reliable for such simple pages.

Issue tracking

The desire to properly report this presumed issue brings me to a
meta-issue: does SPI not have an issue tracking system?
I only found related discussion in a 2012 IRC log, from 21:15 to 21:18:
http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/logs/2012/2012-04-12-log.txt

On 07/16/2016 06:58 AM, Philippe Cloutier wrote:
> Greetings to all, and in particular to those I have not had the chance
> to collaborate with yet.
> Yesterday I became a SPI member, apparently thanks to Martin
> Zobel-Helas, just in time for the 2016 SPI board elections, in which I
> was able to vote.
>

Welcome!

> Joshua D. Drake
>
> Just one comment on a specific statement, Joshua's. It contains:
>> Getting business items in order such as proper insurance and
>> professional services.
>
> What this means is vague for me (I fail to see what "business items"
> means concretely).
>

Concretely, the corporation is not properly protected against potential
hostile or negligent action. This protection usually comes in the form
of Limited Liability and Director's an Officers insurance.

I would like us to have better, more streamlined access to member and
project services. Why does it take us potentially weeks to fulfill a
reimbursement request? It should be 72 hours tops. Part of this is
technological, part of it is human. I want to fix that.

I also do not think that the corporation properly or efficiently
communicates with projects or members. I would like to see us engaged
with projects, not passively helping with they pop up. I would like to
see an active volunteer pool from members to help us with FOSS projects.
Everything from generating educational videos and tutorials to being
present at conferences.

>
> General
>
> Most statements say a lot more about what one has done than about what
> one intends to do. There's still one easy information about who
> candidates are which is usually missing : their age.
>

I am not sure that age is relevant but I am 43. I am more interested in
a candidates willingness to participate, be effective and move the
corporation forward versus whether they are 22 or 65.

> I ranked candidates based on what their statements said about their
> achievements, their goals, and my prior perception of them. Being a
> long-time Debian developer, my ranking surely shows some bias. I was
> hoping for commitments to transparency but did not read much on that.

I would argue that transparency is implied. We are a U.S. based
non-profit and the rules are pretty clear. Every member is able to
attend every board meeting, all of our resolutions and financial matters
are public etc...

>
> Issue tracking
>
> The desire to properly report this presumed issue brings me to a
> meta-issue: does SPI not have an issue tracking system?

We do for reimbursements. Usually any feedback of that kind would go
through the -private list. However, I could certainly see opening up a
tracking system for other items, especially member concerns as a whole.
That is a good idea.

I hope my perspective helps!

Sincerely,

JD
--
Command Prompt, Inc. http://the.postgres.company/
+1-503-667-4564
PostgreSQL Centered full stack support, consulting and development.
Everyone appreciates your honesty, until you are honest with them.

Hi Joshua,

On 2016-07-16 18:23, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On 07/16/2016 06:58 AM, Philippe Cloutier wrote:
>> Greetings to all, and in particular to those I have not had the chance
>> to collaborate with yet.
>> Yesterday I became a SPI member, apparently thanks to Martin
>> Zobel-Helas, just in time for the 2016 SPI board elections, in which I
>> was able to vote.
>>
>
> Welcome!
>
>> Joshua D. Drake
>>
>> Just one comment on a specific statement, Joshua's. It contains:
>>> Getting business items in order such as proper insurance and
>>> professional services.
>>
>> What this means is vague for me (I fail to see what "business items"
>> means concretely).
>>
>
> Concretely, the corporation is not properly protected against potential hostile or negligent action. This protection usually comes in the form of Limited Liability and Director's an Officers insurance.

That is still quite abstract for me (What kind of "hostile action" are we concerned with?).

>
> [...]
>
>>
>> General
>>
>> Most statements say a lot more about what one has done than about what
>> one intends to do. There's still one easy information about who
>> candidates are which is usually missing : their age.
>>
>
> I am not sure that age is relevant but I am 43.

Thank you

> I am more interested in a candidates willingness to participate, be effective and move the corporation forward versus whether they are 22 or 65.

Me too.

Below a certain age, lack of maturity may make a candidature a lot less interesting. But in the end, it seems that all candidates in the last election had plenty of maturity. To clarify, that question only came to me when reading one specific platform. I was just suggesting this because it is trivial to include this information, not because it is particularly lacking.

>
>> I ranked candidates based on what their statements said about their
>> achievements, their goals, and my prior perception of them. Being a
>> long-time Debian developer, my ranking surely shows some bias. I was
>> hoping for commitments to transparency but did not read much on that.
>
> I would argue that transparency is implied. We are a U.S. based non-profit and the rules are pretty clear. Every member is able to attend every board meeting, all of our resolutions and financial matters are public etc...

While there is a large part of our operations which is transparent, I did not suspect that such a part was not.

From the 5 mailing lists, 3 are private. And the only private list I have access to seems to have more traffic than the public lists combined, if I trust the sample formed by the couple of weeks of presence I have. That would mean public discussions are a minority of SPI's mailing list discussions.

The contact page gives only private contact adresses for the board, the officers and the website.

The number of members is not available, nor is a list of these members, a list of members who requested to become contributing members, or the list of members whose contributing membership application was rejected.

Passive transparency would be a great start, but some basic facts should also be published. For example, I cannot see SPI's staff.

>
>>
>> Issue tracking
>>
>> The desire to properly report this presumed issue brings me to a
>> meta-issue: does SPI not have an issue tracking system?
>
> We do for reimbursements. Usually any feedback of that kind would go through the -private list. However, I could certainly see opening up a tracking system for other items, especially member concerns as a whole. That is a good idea.

Thank you very much for that (and your other answers). I have formally requested SPI to implement such a system in thread "Issue #0 - No general-purpose issue tracking system": http://lists.spi-inc.org/pipermail/spi-general/2016-July/003493.html

[...]

--
Filipus Klutiero
http://www.philippecloutier.com