Fedora Board election results

[inode0]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-06-25 at 08:39 -0500, inode0 wrote:
>> Another thing that might help is maybe a pre-election statement from
>> the board to wrap some context around an election. What has the
>> current board accomplished? What are the major open issues the board
>> is currently dealing with? Then the candidates rather than saying "I'm
>> going to work to make Fedora great!" could actually address some of
>> the outstanding issues directly. Without some focus on issues that
>> need to be addressed what are we really to base votes on?
>
> What if most of what the Board has to deal with, revolves around legal
> issues that can't be talked about transparently?  There is a reason
> why the Board calls and lists are private.

Then the report says the board dealt with various confidential legal matters.

> There is an unspoken assumption here, that being on the Board gives
> you some amount of new ability to work on fedora community facing
> items or issues. It does not.  The crap that I have to deal with as a
> board member is exactly the crap that noone would ever want to plan to
> do as part of their pre-election statement.  We try very hard to limit
> what we are doing inside the scope of the Board calls and private list
> to items which need to be in the Board calls and private list.

No, there is not an unspoken assumption here about any such thing.
What I am looking for is any reasonable criteria on which to cast a
sensible vote in these elections. That is all. No secret agenda, no
hidden assumptions.

Thus far I have basically heard two explanations of how people
actually did vote. One was "I like candidate X so I voted for him" and
the other was "I voted for all candidates that don't get paid by Red
Hat." If that is all there is to grab onto then I'll continue to not
vote.

> ... snip ...
> If you want to see the next election be issue oriented. Then I think
> asking the sitting Board to explain the issues of importance is
> utterly wrong. It's not in my best interest as a candidate to tell
> other candidates what they are suppose to say.  The community needs to
> tell the Board and the candidates what the important issues should be.

You are making it really hard for me to see why an election matters.

> Most likely the sitting Board will decide the person bringing up a
> specific issue is right and it does needs addressing and will empower
> and task that very same person with addressing it, leaving nothing for
> the new candidates to talk about.

Do we want elections that have candidates that have no issues or
positions and have nothing to talk about with the people they are
asking to vote for them? In the end this is a sham, it has to be a
sham. We have no reason to vote for or against any of these
candidates. Without such a reason there isn't any point in an
election, it will just end up with a small group of people playing
musical chairs until they get bored and decide to do something else.

> In fact we need to community to be doing that on a regular basis,
> telling us what the issues are. Hold our damn feet to the fire.  What
> we need is a way for people in the community who perceive that there
> are issues needing more attention to talk about those issues.  I
> thought this list was meant to be exactly that resource, but maybe its
> not, maybe we need something else.

We can't hold your feet to the fire if you won't tell us what you do. :)

John