How Should I Run My Community Elections?



Sooner or later in the growth of a community project, the question arises of how to choose representatives for the community. For some projects, this is when they lose a founder, and as a group decide to move to a “ruling technical council” model; for other projects, the need comes from the move to a non-profit governing body with paying members, and the desire to have a technical steering committee chosen from members; other projects evolve over time to a representative leadership model.
I have been involved in boot-strapping, reforming, or running elections in a number of different communities over the years (GNOME, Maemo, OpenStack, OPNFV, OpenDaylight, fd.io, and others). Which voting system to use, how to define the electorate, and limiting the pool of eligible candidates have tended to create the deepest rat-hole conversations in all projects I have been involved in when the topic of elections has come up.
The Python project, in the context of debating a governance change, recently put together a comprehensive survey of project governance and voting procedures, and voted to move to an elected Steering Committee model. This article attempts to synthesize some of the best practices I have seen used in various projects and elections, covering who gets to vote, who can be a candidate, and how elections are run.
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