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vote_admin_guide - Perl Governance Vote Administrator Guide
Running a Steering Council nomination process
Announce the nomination period to the Perl Core mailing list. Be explicit about the end time. Set a calendar reminder for yourself for when it's time to close the nominations and begin the voting.
Remember that inactive Core Team members may not participate in the nomination or voting process. The governance document is clear that inactive members may not declare themselves active when a vote is proposed, which includes the nomination process.
If someone outside the Core Team is nominated, contact them to confirm that they accept the nomination. If they do, ask the Steering Council to add them as a moderated member of the Perl Core list for the duration of the election and invite them to offer a statement on their candidacy to the list.
Before the end of the nomination period, remind everyone of the schedule and share the current list of nominees to confirm you aren't missing anyone.
At the end of the nomination period, notify the Perl Core list of the list of nominees and set their expectations for when you'll be opening the voting period.
Using CIVS
We are using Condorcet Internet Voting Service (CIVS), which is pretty easy to use, although it has a lot of options.
First, bookmark that link, but realize that there are no user accounts. Whenever you create or participate in a poll, you'll get a unique URL, and you need to save it to come back to what you were doing before.
Preliminary work
You'll need to complete these steps.
Get list of active Core Team member emails
This can be found in the Porting/core-team.json file.
Remind Core Team members to opt-in their email address
CIVS has a required opt-in to send polls out to an email address. The active Core Team members that would like to vote and haven't opted-in yet must use the following link with the email address they have in core-team.json: https://civs1.civs.us/cgi-bin/opt_in.pl
Running an election on CIVS
The following instructions describe steps to run an election.
Creating a poll
On the right sidebar of the CIVS landing page is a list of links, and the first one is Create a poll. Some of the things it asks for are simple: what's it called? Who is running it? It asks for an email address, and it has to work: that's where you're going to get all the links!
Note that "day and time you plan to stop" is just a text box. It gets sent to the recipient in their invitation to vote. It does not schedule one dang thing, so you better set yourself a reminder to close the poll on time! Also, remember to think about time zones! (You are free to selfishly pick your local time.)
The description box is limited HTML: you can put in <p> and <b> and <ul> and <a> and some other basics. Hit "preview" whenever you want. Also, you'll be able to see the email before you send it to everybody.
The "names of choices" is line by line. Blanks are ignored. Again, use preview. Also, note that these will be presented to the voters in random order, so the order you put the candidates doesn't matter. (CIVS lets you force the ordering, but we don't use that.)
The options you want are:
* How many choices will win: 3
* Private
* Enable detailed ballot reporting: true
* Enforce proportional representation: true
Assume maximizing rank of their favorite choice: trueLeave all other options off.
Then you can create the poll.
Start the poll
You'll get an email linking back to the poll's control page.
BOOKMARK THE CONTROL PAGE!
Don't lose that link or you won't be able to administer the poll and you'll have to re-create it.
From here, you can double check your settings. Some things, but not all, can be edited.
If it looks good, click "start poll." You'll get a success page and can click "go back to poll control".
Check how the email looks
At the bottom, under "Add voters", enter your email address. Click "add voters." You'll get another success screen and can again "go back to poll control."
Meanwhile, you'll get another email, this one linking you to the voting page itself. Proofread the email. Click the link. Proofread the page. If you want, cast your vote!
At this point, you probably either need to start over - because you can't edit a poll once it's going - or you're good to proceed. If you need to start over, just close the poll (or not, but it seems polite to do so) and start over. Otherwise...
Send the poll!
This is the point of no return! Once you send the poll to the whole team, you'll look silly if you made a big mistake. That's okay, you can survive looking silly, but it's better to avoid it if you can.
Put all the email addresses for the team into the "add voters" on the poll control page. There should be as many of these as there are team members. Double check! It's okay if you enter your email address, again. You won't be allowed to vote twice.
Click "add voters." It will take a little while. (I think it does all the email sending synchronously.) When that's done, you can email the list to say the ballot has been sent.
If you're told that some email addresses aren't authorized to vote, chase down these Core Team members that haven't opted-in their email address.
Wait
Now you just need to wait for the end date. Set a calendar alarm to remind yourself. Look at the poll control page once in a while to see how many votes were cast. Because votes can't be edited once cast, you could end the voting immediately once 100% of ballots have been cast, but don't expect this will actually happen.
End the poll
When it's time, go to the poll control page and click "end poll". You'll get dumped on a results page that will provide the three winners (and a bunch of other data). Use the "minimax" rule (the default). Everyone else will be able to access these results, so don't worry about copying anything but the winners. Inform the group!
After an election
In addition to notifying the Perl Core mailing list of the results, open a pull request to update perlgov.pod with the new Steering Council members. If a non-Core-Team candidate won, also add them to the Core Team list.
Ask the outgoing Steering Council to:
edit the Perl Core mailing list admins to match the incoming Steering Council
update the GitHub "steering" team to match incoming Steering Council
request that the Perl NOC update the perl-security list to include all incoming Steering Council members (without removing outgoing members; the incoming Steering Council will decide whether this is needed)
Update this guide with any clarifications or new information that will help the next Vote Administrator.
Relax and congratulate yourself!