Flock voting issues

[Josh Boyer]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2015 at 5:53 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 04, 2015 at 05:32:12PM -0400, Ruth Suehle wrote:
>> > I've always thought of it as a general gauge of community interest in
>> > the topic, which hopefully corresponds to the interest of the people
>> > going. We could try simply messaging that better — and by "we", I
>> > definitely include myself, because I know I've said things like
>> > "voting is open everyone come vote, and hope to see you there".
>> While conceptually that works, "I got all my friends to vote for me" isn't
>> a good gauge of overall interest. This is also partly why the final
>> schedule is 99% community vote with 1% room for something like if not
>> enough people voted on hearing the Fedora Council get together, but we know
>> that's still important, we put it on the schedule anyway.
>
> I guess also my corresponding assumption was that it was more like 20%
> community vote.

Really?  Did you even really think about this before you made such an
assumption?  Let's break some stuff down here.

1) The number of talks submitted, while encouragingly growing year
over year, is not so plentiful as to allow us to pick and choose talks
on a whim.

2) If you compare the set schedule with the voting results, you will
find an extremely high correlation of high voted talks on the agenda.
To the point where some of the talks were accepted even with large
reservations from the planning committee.  Multiple times.

3) Why would we even bother holding a vote if the results were going
to be essentially meaningless?  What would be the point of the hassle
and arguing about it?

So, to sum it up, the votes matter, they matter probably the most out
of everything, and the committee tries very very hard to not overrule
or deviate from the results without a very good reason.  Which means
that people that are attending need to vote and that we need to avoid
gamesmanship involving people who otherwise do not care.

josh