Dear colleagues!
While full-fledged face-to-face meetings are not possible, I would like to discuss with you some changes to the ENOG Charter. Our event is not the first-year-old and the mechanisms that were once put in place when it was still very immature now look outdated.
First of all, this applies to the election of the Programming Committee (PC).
First, there is currently no rotation in the PC. In other words, a person, once in the PC, can stay there indefinitely, and it does not matter whether he does something or not.
Second, if someone voluntarily leaves the PC, a new PC member is elected by the old PC members. Thus, you get an airtight system that votes for itself. This is certainly not a disaster, but it becomes difficult to argue that the Programming Committee represents the ENOG region community - rather, in the current situation, it represents itself.
I propose that here and now, on our ENOG Discussion mailing list, the community discusses the principles by which the ENOG Programming Committee should be formed. Hopefully, we will come to some consensus, and we will be able to elect new PC members at the next ENOG under the new rules.
*There are other proposed changes to the ENOG Statutes, but they are suggested to be discussed during the event itself, during the BoF session.* There are two basic options for elections that can be modified, of course.
The general point: a PC member leaves the committee after 4 ENOG meetings, and elections are called for the vacant seat.
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*First option.* The size of the technical communities varies greatly from country to country in the region. It is the Programming Committee's job to analyze the relevance of the program to the local audience, and the event itself is held in different countries of the region. A simple vote may result in the PC being made up of representatives from one country (two at the most), and the PC will have quite obvious problems with this task. Moreover, due to the complex political situations in the region, it may turn out that the full Programming Committee will not be able to attend the event in another country.
Therefore, it is proposed to conduct elections according to the following principles:
1) Only those participants of the event who are personally in the room vote (thus, we get rid of potential "cheating" by mass creation of "dead souls")
2) Voting follows the same rules as usual: 2.1) each voter presents a list of N candidates in order of preference, and the first candidate gets N points, the second N-1, and the last one 1 point; 2.2) The points for each candidate are summed up, and the list is constructed in descending order.
3) The best candidates representing *different* countries are chosen.
4) If after that there are vacancies in the PC, we choose the right number of candidates from the top of the list, regardless of which country they represent.
In this way, the best candidates from different countries of the region are selected for the PC.
Additionally, a temporary member from the host organization is added to the PC for the duration of one ENOG meeting.
Also, after 4 ENOG meetings, a PC member cannot be immediately nominated to the PC (but can be nominated after 1 meeting).
*Second option.* Half of the seats on the PC are chosen by a vote of the audience, and half by a vote of the PC itself.
It is assumed that the PC, in case of a country imbalance, will resolve the issue by bringing in other members within its quota.
Those members of the audience who have registered for the last 3 or more ENOG meetings have the right to vote. This protects against "cheating".
The principles of vote counting in PC voting and audience voting are the same as in the first option. =====
The first option was worked on by myself and Hisham Ibrahim (MENOG), with the involvement of Maxim Burtikov, Vahan Hovsepyan, and Artem Gavrichenkov.
The second option was suggested by Anton Baskov.