Am I the only one who missed the election?

[Benjamin Lewis]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2012, Adam Williamson wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 13:56 -0800, Richard Vickery wrote:
> Fedora don't conduct election business of any sort via email. But since
> email is probably the #1 means of communication within the Fedora
> project, elections are *publicised* via email (as well as various other
> methods).
>

Speaking from experience (in this case running elections for the Union
Society... ever a fun occupation!) you can never really have too much
publicity surrounding an election.

That being said, what it is important to do is define clearly, in the
rules governing the election, where the election *must* be announced.
Then the onus slightly shifts: if someone wants to know about elections
they should take some care to ensure they are subscribed to whatever
list is used for that purpose. I would recommend the announce list
and the wiki.

Every other communication should then contain a 'disclaimer' (to use a
bad term) noting that the official notice is always on the announce list
and that that notice is authoritative. Ditto for lists of candidates, how
to vote, results, etc.

> Your mail seems to imply the conclusion "...and thus we should not
> announce elections via email", which doesn't seem like something anyone
> would welcome. :)
>

There is absolutely no harm in announcing/publicising elections in more
than one place, but all those messages should point back or refer to the
official notice.

The important consequence of this is that if one of the 'courtesy'
messages is missed during a particular election then that should not
invalidate the election in any way.

Now, as for whether members of FAS/cla_done/<your favourite metric here>
should be auto-subscribed to something. In principle, this would seem
like a good idea. The traffic on the announce list is very low and if
devel-announce, test-announce, etc. is used correctly everything posted should actually be of interest to
pretty much all of FAS and/or cla_done.

[On a slight, but nice side note, range voting is so much better than
FPTP or AV :-)]

-- 
Benjamin Lewis
Returning Officer and Past-President
Durham Union Society