On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 6:06 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta(a)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/msg0...
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?