December 2010 Fedora Election Plan

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 11:08, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>

>>> governance and the number of electable Board members, which, really,
>>> is a Pandora's box of discussion that doesn't need to be opened at the
>>> moment.
>
> Fair enough. It's just a personal pet-peeve of mine when any
> organization claims to operate as a democracy but tends towards an
> extremely limited voting population. I'm just trying to identify ways
> that we can involve the community more in the election process. Other
> suggestions are welcome.
>
> Can we come up with ways to incentivize voting, somehow? (I'll admit
> that I'm coming up dry on ways to do this).

The groups I see not voting fall into the following:

A) There is the crowd who basically think the board, fesco, famsco,
etc are just shills of Red Hat and the ability of any candidate to
make a change will not change that. Why those people stay with
"Fedora" is usually a mislaid thought that all their work would be
lost OR that they won't go until X leaves (where X is some Red Hat
employee they hate as much as the particular RHer hates them). [Or
that they are some last vestage of the True Fedora: fedora.us versus
the mockery it is now.]

B) There is the crowd that does not see why electing anyone will
affect them. They are here to get packages, make packages, and
everything else is something that gets in the way of those two things.
They are not here for social reasons, they are here for practical
reasons and all this Friends, First, etc is a distraction.

C) There is the group that is happy with things and aren't really
interested in voting. They will vote if they think something stupid is
going to happen but beyond that really do not see any reason.

I am not sure what to do beyond proposing at the election of making
voting mandatory.. which would fall under stupid enough to get people
to vote against it.




-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.
“The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.""
— Herb Kelleher, founder Southwest Airlines