General Resolution: Limiting the term of the technical committee members

Time Line

Proposal and amendment Monday, 1st December 2014
Discussion Period: Monday, 1st December 2014
Voting Period: Friday, December 19th, 00:00:00 UTC, 2014 Thursday, January 8th, 23:59:59 UTC, 2015
The voting period has been extended with 1 week.

Summary

Both proposals aim at creating a regular turn-over of Technical Committee members, by enforcing a term limit of about four years. The proposals differ in the way they react to resignations or removals of TC members for reasons other than term limit.

Proposer

Stefano Zacchiroli [zack@debian.org] [text of proposal] [Call for vote]

Seconds

  1. Jakub Wilk [jwilk@debian.org] [mail]
  2. Aníbal Monsalve Salazar [anibal@debian.org] [mail]
  3. Ricardo Mones [mones@debian.org] [mail]
  4. Didier 'OdyX' Raboud [odyx@debian.org] [mail]
  5. Cyril Brulebois [kibi@debian.org] [mail]
  6. Colin Tuckley [colint@debian.org] [mail]
  7. Sebastian Ramacher [sramacher@debian.org] [mail]
  8. Steve McIntyre [93sam@debian.org] [mail]
  9. Martin Zobel-Helas [zobel@debian.org] [mail]
  10. Steve Langasek [vorlon@debian.org] [mail]
  11. Bernd Zeimetz [bzed@debian.org] [mail]

Text

Choice 1: Option 1

The Constitution is amended as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- constitution.txt.orig       2014-11-17 18:02:53.314945907 +0100
+++ constitution.2-S.txt        2014-11-21 16:56:47.328071287 +0100
@@ -299,8 +299,20 @@
        Project Leader may appoint new member(s) until the number of
        members reaches 6, at intervals of at least one week per
        appointment.
-    5. If the Technical Committee and the Project Leader agree they may
+    5. A Developer is not eligible to be (re)appointed to the Technical
+       Committee if they have been a member within the previous 12 months.
+    6. If the Technical Committee and the Project Leader agree they may
        remove or replace an existing member of the Technical Committee.
+    7. Term limit:
+         1. On January 1st of each year the term of any Committee member
+            who has served more than 42 months (3.5 years) and who is one
+            of the two most senior members is set to expire on December
+            31st of that year.
+         2. A member of the Technical Committee is said to be more senior
+            than another if they were appointed earlier, or were appointed
+            at the same time and have been a member of the Debian Project
+            longer. In the event that a member has been appointed more
+            than once, only the most recent appointment is relevant.

   6.3. Procedure

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a transitional measure, if this GR is passed after January 1st, 2015,
then the provision of section §6.2.7.1 is taken to have occurred on January
1st, 2015.
    

Amendment Proposer A

Lucas Nussbaum [lucas@debian.org] [text of amendement]

Amendment Seconds A

  1. Sam Hartman [hartmans@debian.org] [mail]
  2. Didier 'OdyX' Raboud [odyx@debian.org] [mail]
  3. Bernd Zeimetz [bzed@debian.org] [mail]
  4. Colin Tuckley [colint@debian.org] [mail]
  5. Matthew Vernon [matthew@debian.org] [mail]

Amendment Text A

Choice 2: Option 2

The Constitution is amended as follows:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
--- constitution.txt.orig       2014-11-17 18:02:53.314945907 +0100
+++ constitution.2-R.txt        2014-11-24 10:24:42.109426386 +0100
@@ -299,8 +299,22 @@
        Project Leader may appoint new member(s) until the number of
        members reaches 6, at intervals of at least one week per
        appointment.
-    5. If the Technical Committee and the Project Leader agree they may
+    5. A Developer is not eligible to be (re)appointed to the Technical
+       Committee if they have been a member within the previous 12 months.
+    6. If the Technical Committee and the Project Leader agree they may
        remove or replace an existing member of the Technical Committee.
+    7. Term limit:
+         1. On January 1st of each year the term of any Committee member
+            who has served more than 54 months (4.5 years) and who is one
+            of the N most senior members automatically expires. N is
+            defined as 2-R (if R < 2) or 0 (if R>= 2). R is the number of
+            former members of the Technical Committee who have resigned,
+            or been removed or replaced within the previous 12 months.
+         2. A member of the Technical Committee is said to be more senior
+            than another if they were appointed earlier, or were appointed
+            at the same time and have been a member of the Debian Project
+            longer. In the event that a member has been appointed more
+            than once, only the most recent appointment is relevant.

   6.3. Procedure

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Quorum

With the current list of voting developers, we have:

 Current Developer Count = 1026
 Q ( sqrt(#devel) / 2 ) = 16.0156173780470
 K min(5, Q )           = 5
 Quorum  (3 x Q )       = 48.0468521341409
    

Quorum

Data and Statistics

For this GR, like always, statistics will be gathered about ballots received and acknowledgements sent periodically during the voting period. Additionally, the list of voters will be recorded. Also, the tally sheet will also be made available to be viewed.

Majority Requirement

The proposals need a 3:1 majority

Majority

Outcome

Graphical rendering of the results

In the graph above, any pink colored nodes imply that the option did not pass majority, the Blue is the winner. The Octagon is used for the options that did not beat the default.

In the following table, tally[row x][col y] represents the votes that option x received over option y. A more detailed explanation of the beat matrix may help in understanding the table. For understanding the Condorcet method, the Wikipedia entry is fairly informative.

The Beat Matrix
 Option
  1 2 3
Option 1   133 208
Option 2 75   196
Option 3 25 36  

Looking at row 2, column 1, Option 2
received 75 votes over Option 1

Looking at row 1, column 2, Option 1
received 133 votes over Option 2.

Pair-wise defeats

The Schwartz Set contains

The winners

Debian uses the Condorcet method for voting. Simplistically, plain Condorcets method can be stated like so :
Consider all possible two-way races between candidates. The Condorcet winner, if there is one, is the one candidate who can beat each other candidate in a two-way race with that candidate. The problem is that in complex elections, there may well be a circular relationship in which A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A. Most of the variations on Condorcet use various means of resolving the tie. See Cloneproof Schwartz Sequential Dropping for details. Debian's variation is spelled out in the constitution, specifically, A.6.


Debian Project Secretary