Allow up to 2 elected board members from a single company

[Mark Waite]

The Jenkins elections have completed.   Thanks to Gavin Mogan and Ewelina Wilkosz for their two years of service on the board.  Thanks to Ulli Hafner and Alex Brandes for accepting the nominations as new members of the board.  They begin their service on the board December 3, 2022.

I've submitted a pull request proposing a revision to the board membership rules for next year's election (November 2023).  The proposal has been discussed in Jenkins board meetings.  I was asked to solicit opinions and encourage discussion in the larger community of Jenkins developers before a final decision by the board.

The proposal is:

Allow up to 2 elected board members from a single company

Governance board needs members that are actively involved in the Jenkins project. By specifically allowing up to 2 elected board members from a single company, we do not create a majority of elected members of the board from a single company.

The issue comes because the board has declared previously that Kohsuke is affiliated with CloudBees. His permanent membership on the board and his affiliation with CloudBees means that only one other person from CloudBees can serve on the board. The board needs more active participants to assist with the work of the board. Allowing 1 more board member from CloudBees or any other company that already has a member on the board will strengthen the board and its work to serve the Jenkins project.

[Alex Earl]

+1 from me

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[Basil Crow]

+1 from me as well. Since the time the current rules were established, Kohsuke has begun a new chapter in which he has focused his attention on Launchable and decreased his involvement in the Jenkins community and CloudBees. This proposal honors Kohsuke's foundational contributions to the Jenkins community while also acknowledging his shifting priorities and empowering the Jenkins community to evolve accordingly.

[Alyssa Tong]

I think this would be worthwhile to try so +1 from me. Hopefully this will open up to more participation.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 11:21 AM Basil Crow <m...@basilcrow.com> wrote:

+1 from me as well. Since the time the current rules were established, Kohsuke has begun a new chapter in which he has focused his attention on Launchable and decreased his involvement in the Jenkins community and CloudBees. This proposal honors Kohsuke's foundational contributions to the Jenkins community while also acknowledging his shifting priorities and empowering the Jenkins community to evolve accordingly.

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[Ullrich Hafner]

I am currently -1 for this change, but I do not yet have access to the full governance board discussion yet.

Basically, the reasoning for this change is not clear for me. Looking back in the history of the governance board, we are 4 active members making all the decisions. As far as I remember, Kohsuke did not participate in a decision in the last couple of years. So in practice we have 4 votes in our meetings, and if 2 of these votes are from one company this company can block any decision. They have not majority, but we have a stalemate which is a potential risk. So I would prefer to not change the current situation. It would even make sense to update the current rule so that no company can get 50% of the 4 elected seats. Then we do not need discuss if Kohsuke is affiliated with Cloudbees or not.

If the reasoning for the change is, that we do not have enough people that want to help with the governance of the Jenkins project (no election for all positions of the officers and board members required) we should also rethink if the number of board members is too large? The number of active community members in Jenkins is getting smaller year by year (the number of new Jenkins features as well), so maybe it would make sense to reduce the number of seats as well? The number of board members should reflect the number of active community members as well.

> The board needs more active participants to assist with the work of the board. Allowing 1 more board member from CloudBees or any other company that already has a member on the board will strengthen the board and its work to serve the Jenkins project.

Here it would help to elaborate, what these work items are? From my understanding and from our statement, the board is

> The decision-making ability of the board is more symbolic and honorific


So if there is too much work we should rethink if this work could be delegated to other roles in the Jenkins project.

[Basil Crow]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2022 at 11:57 PM Ullrich Hafner
<ullrich...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Basically, the reasoning for this change is not clear for me.

The reasoning is simply that the rate of creation of new governance
action items is far higher than their rate of completion; i.e., a lack
of bandwidth. Adding a second board member from CloudBees will
accelerate the rate of completion of governance action items for the
benefit of the broader Jenkins community.

> They have not [a] majority, but we have a stalemate which is a potential risk.

I cannot think of a situation in which we even came close to a
stalemate over the past year. True, different people had different
views about when to require Java 11, but that issue never even came to
a board vote, let alone a stalemate. This proposal is certainly not a
move to obtain veto privileges. On the contrary, I think increasing
active engagement on the board would result in less stagnation for
long-standing topics.

> Here it would help to elaborate, what these work items are?

Take a look at the minutes of the last dozen board meetings and note
how many action items remain present for months at a time without
completion, through no fault of the individuals involved. As a small
example, the issue of servlet container support was escalated to the
board over a month ago but did not see significant progress until
today. The lack of bandwidth, while understandable, has long-term
consequences for Jenkins users.

> So if there is too much work we should rethink if this work could be delegated to other roles in the Jenkins project.

There is no shortage of people who are willing to make suggestions and
to delegate work, but taking action items to completion in a timely
fashion is another matter. To paraphrase what I wrote in a different
thread earlier today: "Who is going to implement this?"

Early in my career, I was tasked with implementing a complex project
and could not decide between two competing implementation choices. I
asked a trusted mentor for advice, and he simply replied: "To the
implementer goes the decision." The point was that skin in the game
promotes sound decision-making. I think the same applies here and that
the Jenkins community would be best served by a board composed of
individuals who are completing action items rather than delegating (or
attempting to delegate) them. If those individuals come from outside
CloudBees, their contributions are highly appreciated. But if they
come from inside CloudBees, why not empower them for the benefit of
the broader Jenkins community?

[Mark Waite]

On Tuesday, November 29, 2022 at 12:57:14 AM UTC-7 Ullrich Hafner wrote:

I am currently -1 for this change, but I do not yet have access to the full governance board discussion yet.

Basically, the reasoning for this change is not clear for me. Looking back in the history of the governance board, we are 4 active members making all the decisions. As far as I remember, Kohsuke did not participate in a decision in the last couple of years. So in practice we have 4 votes in our meetings, and if 2 of these votes are from one company this company can block any decision. They have not majority, but we have a stalemate which is a potential risk. So I would prefer to not change the current situation. It would even make sense to update the current rule so that no company can get 50% of the 4 elected seats. Then we do not need discuss if Kohsuke is affiliated with Cloudbees or not.

If the root of your concern is stalemate due to two people elected from a single company, then the current rules already create the potential for that situation today.  If two people from Red Hat, JFrog, AWS, Google, Microsoft, or any other company (with two exceptions) were to be elected to the Jenkins board, that would be allowed by the current rules.  They would not have a majority on the board (2 out of 5) but would be 50% of the active participating members of the board.  There are two companies (CloudBees and Launchable) that are blocked from having two elected members of the board because the current rule disallows a majority of board members to be affiliated with a single company and the current practice has been to declare that Kohsuke is affiliated with CloudBees.

I agree with Basil's observation that we've seen no example of stalemate in the several years that I've been involved with the board.  The most controversial topic brought to the board recently was this proposal to change the rules related to membership of the board.  It had 3 board members in favor, one board member opposed, and Kohsuke stated his support of the proposal separately.

I'm far less concerned with the risk of stalemate than I am with the risk of work not being completed that helps the Jenkins project succeed.

Mark Waite

[Oleg Nenashev]

Hi Mark et all,

There are rumors that the changes to the governance board were voted on January 9th, and I can partially see it in the meeting notes.

I am a bit confused by the current state, because:

• As far as I can tell, there was no formal voting on the mailing list. Many people are likely to have missed the voting, especially since it was announced only on January 8th as a part of the long agenda message: https://groups.google.com/g/jenkinsci-dev/c/URtrswvJDH4/m/SsjfCARZAAAJ . At least, I missed the voting and I would have maintained -1 given the open conversation with Mark in governance board channel and the follow up meeting we were about to have.
• As far as I can tell, the decision was not announced in the developer mailing list or in other venues after 1 month
• The governance documentation was not updated, there were no steps identified
  • https://www.jenkins.io/project/governance
    
  • https://www.jenkins.io/project/board-election-process/
    

Wearing my governance board member hat, I am not sure we can call the voting on this matter completed

Best regards,

Oleg Nenashev