Steering Council Elections 2024

Hello all! This is IchHabeHunger54, moderator of the NeoForged project and the head election officer of this year’s elections.

We held our first-ever elections for the Steering Council (SC) over the last few weeks. This article serves to be a detailed documentation of that process, written from my point of view in the position of head election officer. There is also a TL;DR at the bottom of the article for those who do not care about the fluff.

What and Why?

Before we start, there should be an explanation as to what we are doing in the first place, as well as why. So sit down, it’s time for a little history lesson.

One of the main reasons NeoForged was created was because of the “one person in charge” causing problems in the Minecraft Forge project. (See What is happening? for more info.) To avoid this problem from coming up again, the concept of the Steering Council - a group of project leads with equal rights, i.e., admins - was borrowed from the Python ecosystem and adapted to the newly-created NeoForged project, and it was codified into the NeoForged Governance Document.

Due to the rough nature of the transition from Forge to NeoForge, two of Forge’s now-former admins - cpw and Curle - were appointed permanent seats on the Steering Council. A third member was quickly elected via an informal Discord poll: SizableShrimp. Shrimp later stepped down, and Orion was elected by similar means as his replacement.

So to reiterate, as of before the election, the members of the Steering Council are:

• cpw (@cpw, permanent)
• sci (@sciwhiz12, appointed to represent Curle (@thecurle) who would normally hold the seat, permanent)
• Orion (@oriononline, non-permanent)

The governance document also states that every year, the Steering Council should be newly elected, and at least one of its members should be someone who has not held a seat in the previous term. This process has been put on hold, mainly because there was nobody who felt like doing the surrounding work before and after the election.

That is, until recently. A discussion happening in the #squirrels Discord channel made me aware of the fact that one of the central promises of NeoForged - a transparent leadership - had watered down. As such, I took it upon myself to organize the election that should have taken place months ago. Better late than never, right?

Phase One: Preparations

There was a lot to do. Top priority was making sure that we agreed on how the election would work.

To start, I created a new thread in the #internal-private channel, aptly named “Steering Council Elections 2024”. In there, I posted a long message explaining what, when and why. The main takeaways of that message were:

• There was no objection against my effective self-declaration of head election officer.
• I put out a call for other election officers. ChampionAsh5357 eventually joined me as a second election officer.
• All members of the NeoForged GitHub organization (which was also cleaned up during this time) were eligible to participate, including all members of the Moderator, Maintainer and Infrastructure Team. This amounts to a total of 32 people, including the election officers.
• Election officers are not allowed to nominate, be nominated, or vote.
• There would be four phases: the preparation phase (which we had entered per the creation of the thread), the nominating phase, the voting phase, and the results phase.
• The details about the other phases were hammered out (see below).

Additionally, I also announced the following timeframe:

• The preparation phase began at Saturday, 2024-11-16, 8 PM UTC, which is when that first message was sent.
• By Sunday, 2024-11-24, 12 PM UTC, the preparation phase would end, all details would be considered final, and the next phase would begin.
• Nominating would run from Monday, 2024-11-25, 12 AM UTC to Sunday, 2024-12-01, 12 PM UTC.
• Voting would run from Monday, 2024-12-02, 12 AM UTC to Sunday, 2024-12-08, 12 PM UTC.
• Results would be announced as soon as possible thereafter.

The reasoning for this schedule is that it allowed me to prepare the next phase on a Sunday afternoon instead of a weekday.

Following this announcement, cpw and Curle, as well as Curle’s current representative sci, all announced that they wished to give up their total of two permanent seats in favor of people who could devote more time to the project, transforming them into non-permanent seats. Orion chose to re-run.

This means that all three seats were up for election, and one candidate (Orion) would run again.

Phase Two: Nominations

On Sunday, 2024-11-24, I sent out a call for nominations. The rules were as follows:

• Any person was allowed to nominate any number of people, including themselves. To quote myself, “I trust you all to be reasonable with this and not nominate half of the team.”
• It would not be made public who nominated who.
• A reason for why a person was nominated could be included, but was not required; I opted to make this optional since we all somewhat know each other in the team.
• cpw, Curle and sci (sitting SC members who do not wish to run again), as well as IchHabeHunger54 and ChampionAsh5357 (election officers), could not be nominated.
• Orion had already nominated himself.

Nominations were open until Sunday, 2024-12-01, 12 PM UTC.

At the end, the following candidates had been nominated (in alphabetical order by Discord username):

• dpeter99 (@dpeter99): No reason provided.
• gigaherz (@gigaherz): No reason provided.
• shartte (@gimpansor): “[…] he does try to be reasonable and prevent conflict, understands large portion of neoforge, and gets what direction neoforge should go”
• Matyrobbrt (@matyrobbrt): No reason provided.
• Monica (@monica): No reason provided.
• Orion (@oriononline): “Orion has been the lynchpin that has kept this group together”
• Paul_T (@paul_t): No reason provided.
• Shadows (@shadows_of_fire): No reason provided.
• Technici4n (@technici4n): “[… to continue] to modernize and simplify our systems”
• TelepathicGrunt (@telepathicgrunt): “[…] he often tries to mediate tensions and has been genuinely nice”

Phase Three: Voting

The voting phase started at Monday, 2024-12-02, 12 AM UTC, and was conducted using a closed election within the Helios voting service. It ended at Sunday, 2024-12-08, 12 PM UTC. I put out internal announcements 3 days and 1 day before the end of voting.

Late during the process, we realized that we had no policy in place for a tie. We conferred about this a bit, and ended on the conclusion that a random choice would be best to use. Luckily, this wasn’t actually necessary in practice.

There is not a lot more to be said about this, except that due to a mistake on my end, we actually started voting about half a day late (oops).

Phase Four: Results

After the election ended, I looked at the results and announced them internally first. I then edited this post and pushed it to the public.

A total of 25 votes were cast, out of 30 eligible. As such, the turnout is at 83.3%.

The candidates scored as follows (in descending order):

• Orion (@oriononline): 19 votes
• gigaherz (@gigaherz): 16 votes
• TelepathicGrunt (@telepathicgrunt): 13 votes
• shartte (@gimpansor): 12 votes
• Matyrobbrt (@matyrobbrt): 11 votes
• Monica (@monica): 10 votes
• Shadows (@shadows_of_fire): 9 votes
• dpeter99 (@dpeter99): 6 votes
• Technici4n (@technici4n): 5 votes
• Paul_T (@paul_t): 4 votes

I would like to thank all team members for making this a rather uncomplicated process. I would also like to thank cpw, Curle, sci and Orion for their great leadership of the NeoForged project up to this point, and I hope that we can call them members of the team for a long time to come.

Finally, the election results will need to be put into effect, that is, roles and permissions will need to be redistributed. This may or may not have happened already at the time of releasing this post.

TL;DR

The Steering Council (SC, basically the administrative team) of the NeoForged project has been elected.

The following members previously held a seat on the SC:

• cpw (@cpw)
• Curle (@thecurle, represented by sci (@sciwhiz12))
• Orion (@oriononline)

The following members were nominated for the next term:

• dpeter99 (@dpeter99)
• gigaherz (@gigaherz)
• shartte (@gimpansor)
• Matyrobbrt (@matyrobbrt)
• Monica (@monica)
• Orion (@oriononline)
• Paul_T (@paul_t)
• Shadows (@shadows_of_fire)
• Technici4n (@technici4n)
• TelepathicGrunt (@telepathicgrunt)

The following members were among the top three in the election, and as such will constitute the new Steering Council:

• gigaherz (@gigaherz)
• Orion (@oriononline)
• TelepathicGrunt (@telepathicgrunt)

That would be all. Thank you for your time, and onto a new year of modding!

~ IchHabeHunger54, head election officer