Election Townhall meeting feedback

[inode0]

On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 1:12 PM, Josh Boyer <jwboyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Matt has requested some feedback on the townhall meetings that are
> being held for the various elections, so I thought I would start
> a thread.
>
> As a participant in 3 of these meetings now, I find them to be
> pretty useful.  They give a good insight into how the various
> candidates think and communicate.  And personally I found them to
> be fun to participate in.

I made it to all four of the town halls and participated in them in
various other ways. Overall I was tremendously pleased with them all.
It might be good to take a step back and recall the purpose of them.
Since Fedora elections differ from many other elections in that they
aren't so heavily defined by current events/issues (although they can
be at times I imagine) these were fundamentally an opportunity for the
masses of Fedora users and contributors to meet the candidates, get to
know them a little bit, see how they think and discuss questions put
to them, see how they interact with their peers. For the audience I
think the town hall served these ends very well.

> One comment John Rose pointed out was that some of the questions
> can be difficult to understand for the greater community that
> doesn't follow the on-goings of Fedora day in and day out.  I can
> definitely see how that could be, and perhaps we could address
> that in the future by having the moderators put a bit of context
> or explanation on some of the question topics.

I made this remark in particular about the FESCo town hall and in
retrospect I still think it only really applies to FESCo. I think the
nature of the work FESCo does makes understanding it a bit less
accessible to those not very involved in it. In addition to some
moderator context I think perhaps having the candidates keep in mind
that their audience will contain folks not well schooled in what
happened in last week's meeting and such would help. They can add
context so the audience can understand better too.

The role of the moderator I think is one we should give some thought
to for next time. I received a suggestion, which I think is a good
suggestion, that perhaps the moderator should start off the town hall
with a small number of questions to get things going and to cover a
few important matters before opening up the floor to the audience.
That suggestion I think was motivated by getting a smooth flow to the
event before the shotgun barrage of questions begin.

> I am quite curious to know if the audience found these to be
> useful at all.  Also, for those that couldn't attend, were the IRC
> logs helpful to review?  Do we need to do a better job of
> promoting these so more people attend, etc?

Most of the feedback I have received suggests that the audience did
find them useful and that votes were definitely changed as a result.
I've told the board that in the past I did not vote in part because I
did not feel capable of making meaningful discriminations between
candidates I knew almost entirely from reputation. Spending two hours
with the board candidates definitely changed my feelings of uneasiness
in this regard.

I do have a couple of organizational suggestions for the future. First
as someone who attended all four I can say unequivocally that the
rapid nature of having four of these in such a short time period was
exhausting. Spreading them out a bit more in the future I think would
be nice. Second, I understand that it is difficult for everyone to
attend them but I think it is critically important for all the
candidates to be present. My recollection is, and I apologize if I it
is incorrect, that only FESCo had every candidate present. My hat is
off to them for that. Lastly, I hope we can do more to get voters to
attend the town halls in real time. While reading the log I'm sure
will be interesting and useful you cannot get the full experience of
the town hall that way. You miss conversations in the public channel
among audience members as well as candidates and the after event
opportunity to talk to the candidates as well.

> I'd like to thank Matt for getting these organized and hope we
> can continue doing them in the future.

A really big thank you to Matt for a job well done.

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to honor someone's
contributions by nominating them as well. The many thoughtful
nominations were obviously meaningful and rewarding to the recipients
of them, and in our shared culture of trust the impact of these
nominations reaches far beyond them.

Good luck to all the candidates.

John