community/events/elections

Kubernetes Elections

This document is a guide for Election Committee members conducting a Kubernetes Steering Committee Election.

It is currently a Work In Progress, and contains much that is outdated.

See the Steering Committee Election Charter for more information of how the committee decides when to have elections, eligibility for voting, eligibility for candidacy, maximal representation, etc.

Updated instructions

Election Process

Qualifying Candidates

In order to qualify to run for SC, each candidate must meet three requirements:

1. Be themselves eligible to vote (including exceptions)
2. Have endorsements from two eligible voters who work for a different employer than the candidate

As such, as each candidate files an issue, someone on the EC will need to check those two qualifications:

1. Search voters.yaml and verify that the candidate themselves is in it. If they are not, contact the candidate and suggest that they file an Exception.
2. Look over the +1 in the issue and find two endorsers who work for a different employer than the candidate according to their Github profiles. For each of these, check if they are in voters.yaml. If they are not, keep going down the list of endorsers until you find someone who works for a different company who is.

It is highly unusual for candidates not to qualify to run. In the event that you reach the end of the list of endorsements and the candidate has still not qualified, mention that on SIG-contribex Slack. It is likely that some member of SIG-Contribex will decide to endorse the candidate so that they can run.

When a candidate qualifies, post a comment on the issue based on the Candidate Qualification template. Do not close the issue at this time; the issue should close when the PR with the candidate bio merges.

Out-of-date materials below this line

Steering Committee chooses Election Officers

• Steering Committee selects the Election Officers
• Dates should be in UTC time, use a world clock service in documentation and email announcements so that end users see the correct time and date based on where they live.
• The steering committee was structured in a way so that it does not turn over all at once with staggered terms, therefore all new elections are for two(2) year terms

Election Officers select the following dates

• Recommend the month of October to not collide with a release or end of a quarter.
• Nomination and Voter Registration period start
• Nomination period end (At least a two week period)
• Election period start
  • It takes time to create the poll in CIVS, so don’t give a specific hour, instead say “Morning of the 10th” or something vague.
• Voter Registration Deadline
• Election period stop
  • CIVS needs to be manually stopped, so an actual person needs to click for the poll to stop, so this needs to be a human friendly time
• Results announcement date
• Draft dates will then be passed to the Steering Committee for final approval
• Once Steering approves the dates election officers will work with SIG Contributor Experience to put the election dates on the community calendar
• Election officers coordinate with SIG Docs and appropriate subprojects to coordinate election results blog post

Process

1. Election officers prepare the election repository

   • Make github.com/kubernetes/community/elections/$YEAR
   • Make github.com/kubernetes/community/elections/$YEAR/README.md, this is the voter’s guide
     • Copy over the voter’s guide from the previous year. The voter’s guide is the single source of truth for the election that year! All announcements and notices should link to this document
     • Update with new dates, candidates, and procedures (if necessary)
   • Make github.com/kubernetes/community/elections/$YEAR/OWNERS with all the election officers for the election year.
   • Make github.com/kubernetes/community/elections/$YEAR/voters.md
     • Initial list is generated via the eligibility for voting requirements
     • Officers will update this list as voters submit the voting exemption form
   • Announce to the candidates to submit PRs with their platform statement (if they desire), 300 word limit. Each platform document lives in the elections/$YEAR directory, with the voter’s guide (README.md) acting as the index
   • Ensure officers are members of election@kubernetes.io Google Group and that prior officers are removed
   • Start a shared postmortem document to log the lessons learned so this process can be improved

2. Announce voting schedule to community

• Should mostly be links to the voter guide and the Steering Committee Charter
• On kubernetes-dev list, kubernetes-contributors slack, and twitter

3. Executing the Election in CIVS

• Use CIVS to create the election, which CIVS calls a poll. Once you send out the ballots you cannot UNSEND the emails, ensure everything in the form is correct!
• Name of the poll - “Kubernetes Steering Committee Election for $YEAR”
• Name of supervisor - “Kubernetes Election Officers”
• Email - election@kubernetes.io : Googlegroups doesn’t work here. This mail should resolve to the election officers.
• Date and Time: Write in the date and time the election will stop. This field is not programmatic, the election is stopped by hand, so you can write this in plain text
• Description: Use the following text, modify it for either 3 or 4 positions, depending on the amount of open seats: This election is to nominate the steering committee for the Kubernetes project. Order the candidates by preference, the top $NUMBER candidates will be selected. Please see the voter's guide for more information. PLEASE NOTE: "No opinion" is also a voting option if you do not feel comfortable ranking every single candidate
• Add the candidate list to the form
• How many choices will win: This number needs to be set to the amount of open seats of a given election
• More options, check the boxes for:
  • Do not release results to all voters
  • Enable detailed ballot reporting
  • Allow voters to select “no opinion” for some choices
• Click create poll, this will send election@kubernetes.io an email with instructions
• It will send you a link to “Poll Control”, bookmark this generated page as this is where you will add voters and also resend ballots to people if their ballot gets lost or filtered
• This page is where the “Start Poll” and “Stop Poll” buttons are, start the poll
• WARNING: This is the point of no return:
  • Paste in the registered voters and click add voters
    • It will mail the ballots to the participants
    • It does duplicate detection so multiple entries are fine
    • This might take a while and the web page will not update, this has taken up to 10m in the past as it's sending each ballot. Don't panic or refresh the page
• Leave the poll open for the duration of voting
  • Remember to send a 24 hour reminder before closing the poll
  • Click "Stop poll" at the end of the election, check the previously generated URL that CIVS mailed you when you started the poll
  • Select "Condorcet IRV" on the right hand side of the page to select the results method
• Reporting
  • Mail results of the election to the incumbent Steering Committee members who are NOT running in the election
  • Steering Committee announces the results to the entire community at once at the end of the election, currently during the Community Meeting
  • Submit election results blog to the official Kubernetes blog after the announcement
• Push election results into the community repo under events/elections after the Steering Commmittee has announced the results, typically a week after the election

Roles and Responsibilities:

Steering Committee

• Recuses themselves from public election activities
• Select Election Officers
• Select criteria for who can vote in the upcoming election
• Announces results of the election to the community
• Commit the results of the election to the Kubernetes Steering Committee repository

Election Officers

• Must be eligible to vote
• May be delegated election-related tasks from the Steering Committee as they see fit
• Post on behalf of the steering committee if necessary
• Cannot be running for office in the current election
• Cannot be a current member of the steering committee that is a candidate in the election or whose term extends beyond the election period
• Recuse themselves from public election activities except those required to run the election
  • May vote
  • May answer questions about general election specifics, ie:
    • Where do I find the schedule?
    • How do I vote?
  • Will not answer questions about specific candidates, or anything that could be construed as endorsing, ie:
    • How is $candidate doing so far? (PS - we don't know anyway)
    • Who are your favorite candidates?
• Recommend election dates to be approved by the Steering Committee
• Generate the voter guide and list of voters according to the criteria for that year's election
• Generate exemption form for non-code contributors to apply for voting
  • Review and commit applicants to approved voter's list at least once a week until the election begins
• Track candidates
• Monitor kubernetes-dev for nominations and endorsements
  • Keep track of nominees in a spreadsheet
  • Ensure that each nominee has the required endorsements from three different employers (as stated in the charter)
  • All nominations and endorsements are conducted in the public, so sharing this sheet during the nomination process is encouraged
• Accept/Review pull requests for the candidate platforms
  • The community generally assists in helping with PRs to give the candidates a quick response time
• Update the community regularly via the community meeting
• Post deadlines and reminders to the kubernetes blog, kubernetes-dev, twitter, and slack.
• Reissue ballots from CIVS to voters who might have not received their ballot.
• Guard the privacy of the email addresses of voters
• It is impossible for the election officers to see the results of the election until the election ends; for purposes of transparency with the community it is encouraged to release some statistics during the election (ie. “65% of the community has voted so far!”)
• Ensure that the election results are handed over to the steering committee.