Getting out the vote for the Fedora 10 election season

[Jon Stanley]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:

> Lets see what we can do to encourage people to participate in the
> upcoming elections which will be held in Dec or Jan ( depending on F10
> schedule changes)  This time around we are having multiple elections
> at the same time. Doing it this way allows us to make a concerted push
> to increase the community awareness of all the elections/votes. For
> reference see:
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-September/msg00080.html

I think that this is one of the best things that we can do -
increasing voter turnout by not nickel-and-diming their time to death.
Especially if we hold the ever-popular release naming election at the
same time. But that means we need to come up with suggestions and vet
them through legal quickly.

> So what sort of things can we do? And when should we start doing them?

We should start doing stuff ASAP - not necessarily the entire "get out
the vote" campaign, but there are preparatory things that I'm sure
could be easily done now.

> As a start is there a general need to raise the awareness of the
> election and voting process we are using?
> Can we generate general interest material covering topics like:
> Why vote? How do you qualify for voting? What's this range voting stuff?]

Yes, I think that the qualification methods depend on the particular
election. For some, it's CLA+1, for some you have to be a member of a
particular group, etc. An explanation of range voting would be very
worthwhile, including what to do if you don't know what to do :)

> Community Q/A:
> This is the one thing I've been thinking about a lot myself. I think
> we can try to encourage people to ask questions they want the
> candidates to answer as a way to frame the election and give all the
> candidates a better idea of what the voting community cares about.
>
> It's sort of a two part problem. One we just need to get people out
> there to ask questions. I think this comes down to communicating why
> each election matters.  Can we do that as a marketing campaign? Can we
> "sell" the election process?

Sure, we can do it in every mailing list, announce list, blog,
billboard, TV ad, carrier pigeon, orbital laser, robotic telescope,
etc that we have control over :)

> And second, we need a way to organize those questions and resulting
> candidate answers so they are easily found. I've been talking to
> people specifically about how to organize some sort of community to
> candidate q/a.  Nigel seems to have taken the bait and has a plan on
> how to integrate community questions AND nominations into the voting
> app for all elections.

The voting app is going to grow into being able to do this soonish. As
a contingency plan if it's not available for F11 (I don't think that
will be a problem), we could use the Wiki for it I think. But this
being in the voting app proper is key I think, since it eliminates a
lot of the administrative heartache that currently goes into the
elections process.

> IRC Debate:
> Another idea floating around is organizing a candidate debate for each
> election.  I can't take credit for this idea.  It should be doable. My
> main concerning is how to generate the questions/topics for a debate
> format.  This loops to my personal focus on trying to find a way
> generate questions from the community for candidates to answer.   If
> you've got an idea on how to run a candidate debate for any of the
> elections, feel free to chime in.

I think that this is a wonderful idea - again, as has already been
said in this thread, I think that a format similar to Board meetings
might work.  However, I'd like to take it a step further, and have
Fedora Talk debate. However, the factors that prevent us from doing
the public board meeting like this also prevent us from doing a debate
this way. Without claiming any sort of originality on what the factors
are, here they are for the folks that weren't on IRC when Paul and I
talked about it:

1) No method for GStreamer stream of the audio for folks to just listen
2) No method of archiving the call
3) No method of making it accessible to the hearing impaired.

> Meet the Candidate Videos:
> If candidates wanted to make introductory videos can we organize a
> space for candidates videos that makes it easier for people to find?

A wiki page that points to videos hosted on fedorapeople (or
elsewhere)? Or a similar spot in the replacement for the nomination
wiki page in the election app?