Who has a vote in these elections? Are these able to discuss proposed TAC members in private (private from the public, but visible to all who can elect) before voting?

@Rainer Jung We plan to run the TAC elections similarly to the BAC elections. Each community will nominate candidates, and individuals can also self-nominate. Community members will then vote for their representative, and the elected representatives will form the TAC.

We do not plan to provide this private forum. Discussions about candidates will take place in public forums, allowing the broader community to engage. We expect TAC members to gather input from their communities and adjust future elections based on their specific needs. It is not yet clear whether elections will be run differently for different communities. Our goal is to empower the inaugural advisory committees to define the policies and processes.

Different communities might want different outcomes here.

@Paul Dale Yes, once the TAC is established, all four committees will be responsible for running this ballot across the communities they represent to determine the best fit. We are currently in the bootstrap and exploration phase, keeping the scope narrow to avoid introducing too many variables.

I'll add one more elections suggestions - in Fedora, we use range voting extensively and honestly I like it, especially for open source projects, where many good candidates could run and sometimes it's not that easy to pick one. See https://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/documents/elections-guide/chap-Fedora_Elections_Guide-Range_Voting.html

@Jaroslav Reznik This is a good idea! This platform supports Ranked Choice Voting, which resembles Range Voting. It’s important to recognize that the community - and, by extension, the Advisory Committee members - are responsible for establishing the policy and procedures for the next advisory ballot.

This will result in a least disliked outcome I think (I've not grunged the numbers). First past the post gives the most liked. The question is which do we want?

As an aside: there is a proof that there is no perfect voting system. They all involve compromises. The best that can be done is picking a system that achieves the desired goals most of the time.

there is a proof that there is no perfect voting system.

correct, but the same proves that first past the post is the worst one of them all

so big +1 to any kind of ranked voting

Is there a middle ground here? We would be interested in seeing the list of voters (or, for the Large Corporation community, the list of voting companies) be made public, but not their respective votes. That allows insight into who is actively engaging with the community/process, without some of the drawbacks that folks concerned about fully open ballots are worried about.

(We are also interested in understanding how subsidiaries, acquisitions, joint ventures, etc. are treated for the purposes of voting.)