Hyperledger Blockchain Group Weighs Changes to Fix Election Issues

The Hyperledger blockchain consortium's technical steering committee is discussing potential changes to its elections in hopes of boosting voter turnout.

On Wednesday, Arnaud Le Hors, a blockchain staff member at IBM and TSC chair for 2019-2020, placed on the committee's agenda five proposals to spread awareness and encourage participation in the annual elections.

The proposals were added to a backlog of agenda items concerning governance, including a motion to add four seats to the TSC for the 2019-2020 term and fill them with the runners-up from the last election.

The reform discussions come after IBM employees won 6 of the committee's 11 seats in the election, an outcome that rattled Hyperledger participants concerned about IBM's influence in the consortium.

More significantly, Behlendorf proposed that the process and timeline of the elections should be offered by Hyperledger staff to the steering committee for approval, making the election details more public and well-known.

At Hyperledger, "The running of the election is done by a couple of people at the Linux Foundation and this lifts the burden for the developer community. We have to make sure the TSC and governing board knows what we are doing and has enough oversight."

This oversight would include two election observers who are not on TSC but are longtime members of Hyperledger, Behlendorf added.

At the Oct. 3 TSC meeting committee members raised concerns about confidentiality with election observers that they felt "Ill-equipped." to handle.

In the last election, members filled out forms and their nominations were pooled into a spreadsheet, resulting in members being nominated without their knowledge.

"We restarted the election two days later after pulling their names off."