December 2010 Fedora Election Plan

[inode0]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 12:08 PM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> Fair enough. It's just a personal pet-peeve of mine when any
> organization claims to operate as a democracy but tends towards an
> extremely limited voting population. I'm just trying to identify ways
> that we can involve the community more in the election process. Other
> suggestions are welcome.

Do you think the Fedora Project claims to operate as a democracy?

> Can we come up with ways to incentivize voting, somehow? (I'll admit
> that I'm coming up dry on ways to do this).

While I don't disagree with the instinct to want more participation it
is important to understand why we would desire that. As long as voting
is just a mechanism intended to select people based primarily on a
notion of merit I think the number of voters will forever be tiny.
Most non-voters I know fall into two large categories. One group
doesn't care about governance. The other group cares but doesn't feel
they know enough about the people running to make an intelligent
choice. Questionnaires and town halls I think are largely attempts to
move more people from this latter group into the voter pool. There
just hasn't been any evidence that I can see that it has worked.

John