Guidelines for GC election campaigning in public OpenTelemetry spaces

[trask]

This year's GC Election Committee received a few questions about GC election campaigning in public OpenTelemetry spaces (e.g., Slack channels, GitHub repos, SIG meetings, OpenTelemetry social media).

To be clear, there is currently no guidance on campaigning other than Limiting Corporate Campaigning Support, and we don't believe there were any issues with this year's election.

We are recommending that the (full) GC consider the questions we received and whether any additional guidance should be written down (one way or the other) prior to next year's election.

For Candidates

In public OpenTelemetry spaces:

• Is it ok to say that they are running (outside of the required community nomination process)?
• Is it ok to ask people to vote for them?
• Is it ok to appear in OpenTelemetry-sponsored social media content?

For Community Members

In public OpenTelemetry spaces:

• Is it ok to say who they support?
• Is it ok to say who they don't support?

[jpkrohling]

My take:

Is it ok to say that they are running (outside of the required community nomination process)?

Yes.

Is it ok to ask people to vote for them?

Yes.

Is it ok to appear in OpenTelemetry-sponsored social media content?

Appear, yes. Ask for votes, no.

Is it ok to say who they support?

Yes.

Is it ok to say who they don't support?

I mean... Not classy, but sure. If people have concerns about specific candidates, they should definitely be able to externalize that.

[dmathieu]

My take:

Yes to everything. Maybe/no to:

Is it ok to appear in OpenTelemetry-sponsored social media content?

Appearing in social media content (especially videos, where the person will be directly identifiable, as opposed to blog posts where the author is more easily missed) right before or while the election is happening brings a lot of focus on a candidate, and can influence folks to vote for that person, which is unfair to the other candidates (unless they would also be able to appear in the same kind of otel-sponsored content, for the same amount of time).

[mx-psi]

I agree with @dmathieu. Additionally, I think it wouldn't hurt to have some words on how to best say you don't support a particular candidate