Neary: How Should I Run My Community Elections?

On the Red Hat community blog, Dave Neary writes about community governance and, in particular, how to choose who gets a vote, who can run, and how to decide a winner when electing a leader or council. He summarizes a number of different options that he has encountered with an eye toward avoiding the deep rat-hole conversations that picking a way to run elections can engender.
'Defining the activity metric and minimum bar for what qualifies as participation can become contentious, mainly because where you draw the line will be arbitrary, and will omit people who you want to include, or include people who you want to omit. For example, if you set the bar at the minimum contribution level of one commit to the project, you omit all whose contributions are significant but not code related. The typical fear is ballot stuffing or cohort effects — where large companies will dominate the representative bodies by having a large voting bloc, or where friends of candidates (or people with a certain agenda) will pass the low bar to become voters just to vote for their candidate.'