Elections and infrastructure

[Paul W. Frields]

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don't expect the
server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make
sure the community's ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected
given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure
move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html
https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and
here's the plan we arrived at:

* The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8.
  This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur,
  there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available
  to all community members.  All townhalls will be finished by that
  point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.

* Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the
  elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial
  outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an
  additional day.  For any additional day of outage, we'll extend the
  end of voting by another additional day.  Again, we aren't expecting
  to have to do this, but it's better for us to have a plan ahead of
  time.

* Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a
  logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote.
  This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election
  system, even in the event of a brief outage.  If any user detects a
  problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure
  list, or a Trac ticket.

* Mike is preparing a blog post to the Planet to further spread the
  word about the infrastructure move.  Nigel and I will also post blog
  entries about the information you see here, and I'll send out
  announcements to the appropriate mailing lists.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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