Group proposal: FEMA, the Fedora Election Management and Administration

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On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 08:24:42 +0100,
>  "Sandro \"red\" Mathys" <red at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> I was thinking about why the current elections are going so badly and
>> how to prevent that in the future, too. But do we really need a new
>> group to prevent that in the future? I really like your proposal/draft
>> but is there no existing group that should/could handle the elections?
>
> I think the main issue is that no group owned this, so it didn't get on
> people's radar until things were too close. A group like Larry is proposing
> seems like a good approach. We still need people to step up to make
> the group work, but assuming that happens things should work better in the
> future.

While my sympathies are to support a group to oversee elections I will
point out that I think elections have worked pretty well in the past
without this sort of group. Some introspection on why it worked pretty
well in 2008/2009 and not now might be useful in suggesting what the
real points of failure were and how best to correct them going
forward.

For example, I often hear last minute scheduling cited as a
contributing factor and while that might be a contributing factor it
is also something that has been normal during well run elections too.
If you don't want the election to be a burden on the time of people
working hard to get a release out the door, then you really can't
schedule the election until after the release date is firm.

One suggestion I have is to drop the "30 day" rule and just adopt a
standard starting point relative to the actual release. So, something
like "elections begin on the 2nd Saturday following release."

As Max suggested I'll write up something on the wiki regarding what
has worked well in the past for preparing questionnaires and town
halls to be successful. I walked through a lot of that in
#fedora-advisory-board one day and while it didn't involve rocket
science or much in the way of special skills it did involve a large
number of little things.

Cheers,
John