Fedora Board election results

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 11:17 AM, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I find the whole self-nomination process distasteful. While I
> understand this is normal in some cultures it is very alien to other
> cultures. It seems obvious to me that there are competent and willing
> members who will not self-nominate and I don't understand why Fedora
> insists they be excluded from the process. I would prefer there be a
> way for community members to nominate quality people they know and
> those nominated in this way could accept or decline such a nomination.
> Others could nominate themselves if they wish to.

Did you have someone specific in mind that didn't self-nominate?  Did
you ask them to run?
There is absolutely nothing stopping you or anyone else asking or
daring someone, in public or in private, to run.  I honestly do not
see the point of formal process of nominating other people, with a
formal process of accepting or declining that sort of nomination.  All
that does is slow the process down even further.  If you had someone
in mind that you wanted to see run next time... just make a big fuss
about that person. Tell all of us who it is and why you want them to
run via the planet or this list. There is no reason to formalize it.
That person will either add their name and info to the candidate list
or will tell you to stop embarrassing them.    There is absolutely
nothing stopping anyone from encouraging someone else to step forward
for elections, but we aren't going to demand that candidates be found
that way.

Next time, if you want certain people to run, then get out in front
and make a public suggestion. If nominating someone else leads to
stronger candidates, and stronger support for those candidates...
prove it by making it happen. Next time publicly suggest someone and
convince them to run for the election. And once they are in the
candidate pool, publicly endorse them.  There is absolutely nothing
stopping you or anyone else from throwing a name in the ring for
consideration. If they accept, then its no different than the a
self-nominating process we have now.  All that person has to do is add
their name and bio to the list. There's absolutely no reason that such
biographical information could not include an endorsement section.

I would like to point out that the candidates which did get public
endorsements from other community members on the planet were the ones
who were not elected.

>
> Range voting is another aspect of the process I find discouraging in
> general. Suppose I know 3 of 10 candidates personally (at least I've
> had direct interactions with a small subset of the candidates). The
> other 7 candidates I perhaps know some by reputation and don't know
> some at all. By what rational process am I supposed to assign votes to
> the entire slate of candidates?

Humans are irrational, and thus any voting scheme is going to have
personal bias. If you want to just vote for 3 people, and then vote 0
for all the rest... that's your decision and would be equivalent to
more common forms of ballet voting when multiple seats are open in a
body.  The votes still count.

> Honestly I feel like what my vote ends
> up being is fairly random data and is  as likely to distort the
> process to the detriment of some candidate I don't know and don't want
> to penalize as it is to elect the candidates I might prefer.

Every time you vote in a way that indicates a preference, you penalize
a candidate. More traditional voting schemes are all about penalizing
as many candidates as possible.  Range voting gives you the ability to
penalize with far greater precision, or with no precision at all.
If you choose to vote for everyone equally, then you are making a
statement that you prefer all candidates equal while still voting.
That says something different than not voting at all.

>
> So my choice to not vote was not made out of contentment with current
> leadership, not made out of apathy, not made out of being happy with
> the entire slate of candidates, but rather it was not made out of
> frustration with the voting process.

I do not understand the frustration. Range voting gives individual
voters more flexibility than traditional one vote - one seat voting.
Would you really prefer that you and everyone else got place one vote
for each open seat?  You had the ability to vote that way if you
wanted to inside the range voting setup. Would you force the same
preference on how to rank candidates on everyone else?

-jef