This sounds really good, Chet and Claudia.  I'm copying Sonal Patel's personal email on this. (She will have a mesh email on Sept 1.)

I was reminded that Jory had used this system for voting last year: https://www.opavote.com/   In case it appeals to you.

I notice that the TSC mailing list is not up to date, rarely used, and when used, results in very low response rates. My working hypothesis on this is that folks filter out such email either automatically or mentally as they recognize it as a group email and not one from a person to them directly.  Solution would be to construct a list of addresses and mail directly, or plug the addresses into something like OpaVote.

After the Sept 1 announcement, we should have enough momentum built up to make a strong campaign for TSC elections, though I do expect we will still have a little softness in the community until we show in October a real headwind of commercial work and renewed operational excellence. Possible that we have to go down to a 7 or 9 member TSC this year.

Interested to see how the Gravity form functions. From my pov, any standard form SaaS will do, particularly if it backs up to a nice spreadsheet we can share between authorized users.  (This is the nice thing about google forms, but all good if Gravity does the same with as much ease and good user authentication/security.) 

One other manual thing we need to do is try to match the github id's of contributors in the githubs (/baseline, /baseline-standard) to actual people and their email addresses.  And we'll want to keep this up to date through Oct 3 (the hackathon), because it is greatly hoped that we will have a lot of new contributors who can vote at Eth Atlanta. Copying Kyle Thomas so he's aware of the importance of the hackathon on TSC voting.

Sonal, please feel free to work with Chet and Claudia on this directly as soon as you are on deck.

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 5:39 PM Chet Ensign <chet.ensign@...> wrote:

John, Dan, et al,

Claudia and I put together a proposal for handling the upcoming Baseline TSC election, spelled out below. The goals we aimed to meet are:

- to publicize and make highly visible the role of the TSC and generate excitement about being a part of it;

- to enable nominations to be collected and displayed on a public, addressable, persistent forum of record;

- to identify the people eligible to vote;

- to set up and run the vote on a public platform where the results will be persistent, addressable, and publicly visible and also where we can clearly explain how it will work to everyone.

Proposed process:

- use the baseline-tsc@ mailing list as the list of record, copying others, e.g. eea-community-projects-pgb@, as appropriate. We can include direct emails of people who have expressed interest over time, of course, but having the email list as the list of record ensures a persistent, auditable source of the facts.

- Chet/Claudia work with John on communications to 'sell' TSC participation and encourage people to step up. Possibly two calls, one from John and one from us. Perhaps additional encouragement from OASIS might encourage more people to get involved.
  - We'll check to see whether Carol still has mail merge capability in our toolkit so that we can deliver personalized emails.

- Chet sets up a WordPress Gravity form to collect and forward nominations to the mailing list. Nominees are given the option of sending email directly to the list if they prefer. This gives us the ability to collect exactly the information we want to have. The Gravity forms also store entries in a data file so we should be able to pull the data for further processing if needed.

- Claudia culls the i-CLA spreadsheet for the EEA Community Projects as a whole to identify who the eligible voters are for the TSC (i.e. those made a pull request that was accepted).

- Chet, Claudia work with John to set up the TSC ballot. Exact mechanism TBD.
  - In terms of the mechanics of the ballot, we understand you are targeting 7, 9, or 11 members and we assume that means you want to avoid an even number. Given that, we can work it this way.
    - If you have 7, 9, or 11 nominees, issue a simple call for consent for the slate. No need to run a ballot unless someone objects.
    - If you have 8, 10, or 12 or greater, run the expected 'please select x out of y' ballot to elect your odd number of members.
    - If you have less than 7, either extend the nomination period in an attempt to get at least 1 more, or present the nominees as a slate and ask for objections.  

- Lastly, Claudia and Chet document the procedure so that we can follow it for other OPs in the future. 

Let us know your thoughts on this. Claudia already has the i-CLA list and I will start mocking up the nomination form next week. 

Have a great weekend, 

/chet

--

Chet Ensign Chief Technical Community Steward OASIS Open

+1 201-341-1393 chet.ensign@... www.oasis-open.org