election software

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Oct 09, 2008 at 02:06:20PM +0000, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 18:46 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote: 
> > On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 13:15 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > 
> > > Was any cost / benefit analysis done on this?
> > 
> > Not to my knowledge.
> > 
> > > Aside from one board member's interest in it has anyone
> > > expressed this as an actual need that should be filled?
> > > 
> > > Was that need from the voters perspective or the running members
> > > perspective?
> > > 
> > > Are people running for the board getting inundated with questions?
> > > 
> > > Do we expect the question system to increase voter turnout?  How?
> > 
> > Without hunting the archives, there were several discussions around the
> > last Board election that people wanted a way to ask questions of the
> > candidates.  But I dunno, maybe if you look at it you'll find that it
> > was three people making all the noise. :D
> 
> To sum it up, and without going back and scouring archives, we received
> a number of complaints from community members both inside and outside
> Red Hat that elections for FESCo and the Board aren't informed by
> understanding where nominees stand on any issues.  The complaints were
> that voters have no information on which to make informed choice, but
> rather vote for whom they recognize, meaning the results will always be
> slanted toward people who happen to be getting paid to work on Fedora
> all the time.
> 
> I remember specifically suggesting in a Board meeting that community
> questions could just as easily be picked up on a wiki page and then
> answers solicited from the nominees.  By suggesting that option I was
> hoping that we would not let "scalability" get in the way of
> responsiveness to the community.  I think scalability is a very good
> thing, but we're trying to solve an unquantified problem with an equally
> unquantified solution.  That's sometimes unavoidable when dealing with
> qualitative issues like community satisfaction.
> 
> As I recollect that conversation, we agreed that collecting questions on
> the wiki was the right way to go in the short term, and that the amount
> of community response would determine whether we pursued something more
> comprehensive.

Sorry to reply to myself.  The Board has been discussing this during
the day and seems to agree that switching election systems right now
makes little sense.  We can easily revisit the issue but we should
have a better understanding of the problem we're trying to solve
before doing so.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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