December 2010 Fedora Election Plan

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 10/19/2010 10:19 PM, inode0 wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
>> Stephen John Smoogen (smooge at gmail.com) said:
>>> I propose that we accept this schedule as proposed. We only see about
>>> the same 8 people at the town-halls and probably the same 150 people
>>> voting every year so trying to work around holidays does not seem to
>>> be gaining us much.
>>
>> I'd agree... given the length of the voting period, people should be
>> able to find a time to vote around their holidays of choice. If the
>> town halls fell over a holiday, that could affect candidate availability,
>> but voting should be fine.
>>
>> I remember asking for stats at one point as to how many people vote in
>> the first X days of the election, but I don't remember what the results
>> were.
> 
> The vast majority of voters vote at the very beginning or the very
> end. There is very little voting on the middle days.

OK, with that in mind, I withdraw my concerns about the scheduling, and
instead raise a point of "How do we interest more people into being
involved in the election process?"

At last glance, Fedora account holders had reached well into the
thousands. If we're only seeing 150-200 voters in the elections, then
there's a large percentage of our community that either doesn't know
about them or doesn't know how it affects them.

If users aren't aware of the elections, it means that we aren't doing a
good enough job of advertising it. We should never run the risk of
appearing as if we're holding elections in secret. Perhaps something
similar to what was done on the devel list recently to raise awareness
of release blockers would be helpful. Every day during the voting
process, we should send out a reminder nag message reminding people to
vote and noting the number of days remaining to do so. Furthermore, it
might not be a bad idea to allow a certain amount of campaigning on the
devel lists. For example, each day during the period between publishing
the Questionnaire responses and the start of the voting period, there
should be a highlight email sent out to the list mentioning the
candidate's stated position as mentioned on the elections page, as well
as a link to their answers to the questionnaire. In this way, we can
raise awareness of the actual candidates over an extended period, rather
than just sending a notice at the start of the voting period with "Go
here and read up on all the candidates". I think if we make learning
about the candidates a gradual process, voters would be more inclined to
read up on them (rather than telling them to read up on all of them all
at once)

To address the second issue, that of people not caring about the outcome
of the election, I think we need to do more to explain how the candidate
selection will affect them. I think most people who choose not to vote
in the elections do so because in broad strokes they assume it won't
matter who wins. Taking some of the above steps may help with this, but
we should probably encourage the candidates to do some actual
campaigning of their platforms.

- -- 
Stephen Gallagher
RHCE 804006346421761

Delivering value year after year.
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