KarstenWade/FranchisementGrantProposals

= Franchisement Grant Proposals =

Captured from http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-June/msg02047.html

Bruno Wolff's Proposal
Editor Note: This content was copied directly from the original email 

"My proposal is that anyone that has a fedora account group other than cla_done or cla_fedora or alternatively is a member of the EditGroup for the wiki should be able to vote."

"The intention is to allow anyone who was manually vetted as part of the project to vote. Allowing anyone who has just cla_fedora or cla_done to vote would open the system to abuse as those groups are added without human intervention."

Karsten Wade's Proposal
This proposal is only for the life of the current FESCo elections. It is a bandage to get us through the election without disenfranchising hundreds and hundreds of contributors. Following this election, we need to address real and potential security concerns with having an easy to create account system as the only barrier to voting.

For this one election it is vital we do not disenfranchise 100s of contributors because we are afraid someone will play mischief with our elections.

My proposal is to open the voting to anyone with an FAS account. ( Full details below )

The reason is that we need to make the election as open as we can, by default. This is predicated on two ideas:

1. Openness of the election is more important than the security of the election 1. FESCo is now a group with influence and control that affects all contributors

The strength of our community comes from the active people within it. We need to be wary of anything that makes those contributors feel devalued, even if it is just a small handful. We gain as a community from the collective belief in what we are doing. IMO, it is a much bigger risk to disenfranchisement hundreds of people on purpose or by accident. Comparitively, the risk of someone pranking, gaming, or stealing the election.

Currently, an FAS account is the only way to accept the CLA, a prerequisite for gaining EditGroup in the Wiki, so an FAS account is the same as someone who has GPG signed the CLA.

Further, I propose that a mandatory cooling period be required before voting. This would require a modification to the voting software to check the age of the account. The cooling period should be shorter than the time of the election, so a person has time to "finally create an account" and still be able to vote. For example, if the voting is to last 10 days, the cooling period would be 7 days. This should be announced immediately, so any laggards can finally make their account.

If that is not possible due to time or resources, we are still best to proceed with the most open election possible. Extra diligence is requested of Fedora Infrastructure team to watch for the sudden creation of many new accounts, and so forth.

Pick A Set Of Groups Proposal
The gist of this idea is to have FESCo pick a set of groups who answer/report to FESCo, and only those groups are eligible to vote.

Only Active Contributors Can Vote Proposal
The idea of this proposal is to track active contributors and only give the franchise to those people.

Editor Analysis: This requires additional effort to track, gather, evaluate, and set metrics for what makes an active contributor.