About the current board election process

Hello everyone,

Thanks for bringing up the questions around the board election process.

I went back through my mail archives and, after some digging, found a bit
of historical context:

-

The first elections were held in person at FOSDEM, mainly because
PostgreSQL Europe started at FOSDEM 2008.
-

Later elections (around 2011) moved to the current online system,
largely because not every member could attend FOSDEM in person. The goal
was to make participation easier for the broader membership. The system has
remained largely unchanged since then.

A few clarifications about the current setup:

-

Our election process, as defined today, does not require a secret vote.
-

Our statutes also do not require votes to be secret. For example, voting
during the General Assembly happens by name.
-

The statutes require the board to be elected as part of the GA, and the
current online election process implements this requirement in a practical
way given our geographically distributed membership and how the first few
board elections were originally conducted.

This is not meant to point fingers at past decisions, but simply to explain
how the current process came together.

Following the concerns raised, we have applied the following change to the
PostgreSQL Europe website: “Superusers in the Django website no longer see
the voting tables”. The commit is here:
https://github.com/pgeu/pgeu-system/commit/0955e2b3

This reduces access to voting data to the PostgreSQL sysadmin team, which
currently includes two board members.

Changing this further would be technically difficult within the current
postgresql.org infrastructure. For example, fully separating access would
require significant architectural changes (such as segregated backup
systems and infrastructure responsibilities). Given that both PostgreSQL
Europe and postgresql.org are operated by volunteer teams with limited
resources, this type of separation is currently not practical.

That said, if PostgreSQL Europe members believe the election process should
evolve, for example toward stronger vote secrecy guarantees, this can
certainly be proposed for discussion at a future General Assembly.
Implementing such changes would likely require adjustments to both process
and infrastructure, so having at least a rough idea of the required effort
would be helpful.

Thank you,

--
Andreas 'ads' Scherbaum
German PostgreSQL User Group
European PostgreSQL User Group - Board of Directors