Re: [Tech-board-discuss] Re: Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Elections

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Wed, 2007-08-22 at 17:58 -0400, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 04:43:58PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
>  > >  > The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation
>  > >  > Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the
>  > >  > election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session.
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > Anyone is eligible to stand for election, simply send your nomination
>  > >  > to:
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > Tech-board-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > Only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and
>  > >  > therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email
>  > >  > will be read out before the voting begins.
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > We currently have Three nominees:
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
>  > >  > Greg Kroah Hartman <greg@kroah.com>
>  > >  > Christoph Lameter <christoph@lameter.com>
>  > >  > 
>  > >  > The deadline for receiving nominations is up until the BOF where the
>  > >  > election is held (on the evening of either the 5th or 6th of September.
>  > >  > Although, please remember if you're not going to be present that things
>  > >  > go wrong with both networks and mailing lists, so get your nomination in
>  > >  > early).
>  > > 
>  > > I have a reservation about voting for any of the above.
>  > > Normally during any process involving votes, there exists some sort
>  > > of "why you should vote for me" type statement.  Does such a thing
>  > > exist for this process ?
>  > > 
>  > > Not that I've anything against any of the above candidates, but this
>  > > should probably be more than just a popularity contest.
>  > 
>  > Yes ... well, there was a need to get away from the cronyism of OSDL in
>  > the past.  The problem was to come up with a mechanism that did away
>  > with this.  The elected one was about the best we could find, but if
>  > you've an alternative suggestion, by all means let's hear it.
> 
> Possibly I'm confused about the actual role that these nominees are
> running for.  If it's a rigid position in which they don't get to
> do anything outside of a specific mandate, then any of the above
> would be qualified to represent the kernel community.

It's really just a represent the community type of role.  The LF uses
the TAB to get a sense of the community for various things they and
their members are thinking.  Conversely, the TAB was initially formed to
get a set of specific objectives out of the then OSDL (Doc Fellowship,
Travel Fund, NDA programme and HW lending library plus a few other
things).  The TAB takes proposals from the community for things it needs
that require an organisation to sort out (a good example of this is the
currently being acted on PCI sig membership, which will give us access
to the PCI specs plus a vendor ID that the virtualisation people asked
for to help with virtual device recognition).

> However, if there's flexability for a candidate to bring something
> new to the position, an online statement from each nominee _Before_ 
> the voting begins declaring what they intend to do should they get elected.
> Reading out the statement before the summit and also asking people
> to vote before that happens seems a little disingenuous.

The procedure is to read statements before the election in a BOF at the
Kernel Summit, so the order is statements first then voting.

> Can you explain more about what the succesful candidate would actually
> do for me, and why I (and others) would want to vote one way or the other?

The base requirement is just someone you trust to look after the
interests of the community and correctly reflect them back to the LF.  I
think someone who had concrete proposals to make the LF better or to
come up with new ways it could help the community would be on to a
winner ... but then I'm a bit naïve when it comes to trusting democracy.

James