2020 Jenkins Board and Officer Elections Results

Published on 2020-12-03 by Oleg Nenashev, Alex Earl, Ullrich Hafner

Jenkins Elections

The Jenkins community has recently completed the 2020 elections. On behalf of the Jenkins community and the elections committee, we congratulate all newly elected board members and officers! We also thank all candidates and voters who participated this year.

Election results:

The board positions and officer roles are an essential part of Jenkins' community governance and well-being, and we are excited to see contributors taking these roles. If you are interested to learn more, please see the blog post below.

Governance Board election details

This year we had nine candidates participating in Jenkins Governance Board elections: Andrey Falko, Ewelina Wilkosz, Frederic Gurr, Gavin Mogan, Justin Harringa, Mark Waite, Marky Jackson, Steven Terrana, and Zhao Xiaojie (Rick). All of them are awesome community leaders who actively contribute to the Jenkins project and represent its users. It would be an honor to have them on the Jenkins board. Regardless of the election results, we appreciate their participation and the time they invested in these elections.

This year we were electing 2 governance board members. We were using the Condorcet Internet Voting Service that allows voters to rank their choices rather than just picking their one favorite choice. You can find full voting results here:

  1. Mark Waite (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

  2. Marky Jackson loses to Mark Waite by 48–12

  3. Gavin Mogan loses to Mark Waite by 51–10, loses to Marky Jackson by 31–20

  4. Ewelina Wilkosz loses to Mark Waite by 48–14, loses to Gavin Mogan by 29–28

  5. Justin Harringa loses to Mark Waite by 51–11, loses to Ewelina Wilkosz by 35–16

  6. Steven Terrana loses to Mark Waite by 47–16, loses to Justin Harringa by 20–19

  7. Zhao Xiaojie (Rick) loses to Mark Waite by 57–5, loses to Steven Terrana by 25–24

  8. Frederic Gurr loses to Mark Waite by 52–10, loses to Zhao Xiaojie (Rick) by 25–24

  9. Andrey Falko loses to Mark Waite by 56–6, loses to Frederic Gurr by 26–13

Although Mark Waite came first in the voting results, being on the board would violate the Corporate Involvement clause which states that "the number of board members affiliated with one company must be less than 50%". Mark will continue to be Documentation officer. Regardless of his official role, Mark has been leading many initiatives and helping a lot with various aspects of the community governance.

Congratulations to Marky and Gavin, and thanks to all candidates! All new board members are elected for a 2-year term unless they decide to step down earlier. The estimated end of the term for them is December 02, 2022. We would also like to thank Alex Earl and R. Tyler Croy who step down from the Jenkins Governance Board this year. Thanks to them for all contributions and for continued community leadership.

Statement from Marky Jackson:

It is a tremendous honor to be elected to this roles. I am so humbled. Being part of this community is a fantastic opportunity that I have had. It has given me so many joys. Whether helping to foster community collaboration, working on the roadmap, leading various SIG’s or helping meetups or conferences, this community has given me so much. My goals are bridging the Jenkins project with other interoperability projects, defining the roadmap, achieving roadmap goals, continuing to help meetups thrive, and our conferences focus on the community. I want to ensure we are transparent in our goals and how we achieved them. I want to continue to build up a welcoming community that holds diversity and inclusion at the forefront. I look forward to working with the other members of the Governance Board to continue to deliver on the incredible things this project is known for.

— Marky Jackson, Jenkins Governance Board Member and Events Officer

Statement from Gavin Mogan:

Gavin here. I’m still in shock that I got voted in for the Jenkins board. It felt like yesterday I just got started helping people randomly on IRC. This is truly exciting. I plan to continue to help out as much as I can wherever I can, just in a bit more official capacity. This is truly exciting. I have no firm plans or agenda, just keep pushing advocacy and getting people to help each other in a positive and safe way. My specialities lie in outside of Jenkins core, whether it be working on the plugin site, or hanging out on IRC, Gitter and Reddit helping out where I can.

— Gavin Mogan, Jenkins Governance Board Member

Officer election details

All 5 officer positions were up for election this year. These roles have a 1-year term, with the estimated end of term on Dec 02, 2021. After the initial review of nominations and confirmations with potential candidates, 4 officer positions were uncontested:

Thanks to all Jenkins officers for their continued leadership! Officers take responsibility for many day-to-day processes in the Jenkins community and lead the contributor teams working on them. It requires significant time commitment, and it is not taken for granted.

Release Officer election results

Tim Jacomb won the biggest support as a Release officer (voting results). Tim will replace in this role Oliver Gondža who has been leading the Release Team and the release processes since 2016 when the role was officially introduced.

  1. Tim Jacomb (Condorcet winner: wins contests with all other choices)

  2. Baptiste Mathus loses to Tim Jacomb by 40–23

  3. Victor Martinez loses to Tim Jacomb by 38–25, loses to Baptiste Mathus by 32–31

Here is a statement from Tim Jacomb:

I’m excited for the year ahead, let’s see where we can take the Jenkins release area in the future. As a Release Officer I would like to increase automation, ease onboarding of new contributors to the release team, and ensure that responsibilities rotate among people so that I wouldn’t be a bottleneck for any task.

— Tim Jacomb, Jenkins Release Officer

Thanks to Alyssa Tong and Oliver Gondža for their long-time service as Jenkins officers! We are looking to continue working with them in the Jenkins community. And congratulations to Tim Jacomb and Marky Jackson for joining the team!

Statistics

This year we had 92 registered voters and around 65 actual votes. It is significantly lower than in the 2019 elections when we had almost 350 voters. It can be partially explained by the change of the communication process. This year we decided to not use the previous voter registration system, and we relied on the user and developer mailing lists instead of sending messages to the entire LDAP user database. This is definitely something we need to review at the retrospective.

What’s next for the board?

The last year was awesome for the Jenkins project governance. With help of many contributors and with the renewed board, we have been able to facilitate many initiatives in the Jenkins project, for example hosting contributor summits, publishing the public roadmap, Code of Conduct update, terminology changes, and graduation in the Continuous Delivery Foundation. There is a lot more work to do to grow the community and to ensure the long term sustainability of the project.

In short term, our key priority is to organize knowledge and permission transfers to the new board members and officers so that they can be effective in their new roles. The board will also focus on maintaining the Jenkins governance processes (meetings, budget approvals, funding, etc.) and defining the next steps and priorities.

There are many longer-term initiatives the board could facilitate: long-anticipated features and architecture changes, changing the Jenkins Enhancement Proposal process, creating better communication channels with Jenkins users, and onboarding of new contributors and maintainers. Such initiatives are instrumental for the evolution of the Jenkins project. The ideas will be discussed in mailing lists and during governance meetings. If you would like to share your vision and ideas about what’s needed in the project, it is definitely a great time to contribute!

Feedback

Jenkins project plans to conduct elections every year. We will appreciate and welcome any feedback regarding the election process so that we can improve the process. We have started a Retrospective document for these elections. Everyone can suggest changes in this document, and we will integrate them. There will be also a public retrospective review at the next Advocacy and Outreach SIG meeting on Dec 17.

If you have any private feedback you would like to share, please send an email to the Jenkins Board. If you would like to raise any issues about the election process, please contact one of the elected Governance Board members.

References

About the Authors
Oleg Nenashev

Jenkins core maintainer and board member. Oleg started using Hudson for Hardware/Embedded projects in 2008 and became an active Jenkins contributor in 2012. Nowadays he leads several Jenkins SIGs, outreach programs (Google Summer of Code, Hacktoberfest) and Jenkins meetups in Switzerland and Russia. Oleg works for CloudBees and focuses on key projects in the community.
Alex Earl

Alex comes from a .NET background but likes to get his hands dirty in many different languages and frameworks. He currently does embedded development in a silicon validation group. He is an internal evangelist for Jenkins at his company. Alex is a community contributor to Jenkins, working on plugin hosting and maintaining several plugins. He is also involved in a few SIGS. Alex enjoys working on open source software in his "free" time as well as spending time with his family.
Ullrich Hafner

Ullrich Hafner is an active contributor in the Jenkins project since 2007, mostly in the acceptance test harness and the static code analysis suite (which is now replaced by the Warnings Next Generation Plugin).

He is a professor for Software Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Munich. In his role as professor he tries to win new Jenkins contributors by letting students develop new features and test cases in their student projects and theses.