Fedora Board December 2009 Results

[inode0]

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 9:25 AM, John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:
> To get a true measure of the level of "voter turn out" can you also tell us
> the total number of people that were eligible to vote in this election?

While this is always interesting to see I've been struggling for the
past couple of years with the question of what we want to conclude
from such a measure?

It always seems to grate on people that far more contributors vote for
the codename than vote for anything else, but should it bother us?

There seem to be two main reasons people share with me about why they
don't vote. One is that they are interested in contributing something
in particular to the project so they do that but they aren't
interested in project governance so they don't participate in that
part of the project (just as they don't participate in other project
areas that don't interest them). The other and by far the most common
reason I've heard is that the contributor doesn't know anything about
the candidates beyond perhaps name recognition and for that reason
they just don't feel competent to make an intelligent vote.

We have been trying things to address the second item above by adding
town halls and questionnaires during the election to give contributors
a chance to meet the candidates and get to know them a bit more
personally. We get almost universal positive feedback from both of
these initiatives, but the numbers of people who seem to be affected
by them seems quite small. There has been some negative feedback about
town halls from candidates who feel it is altering the nature of
Fedora elections in a bad way. I don't agree with that criticism at
present but I do admit to seeing it as a danger. [I will say that one
election this year seemed to have some unpleasantness attached to it
that I've not seen before and that I hope to not see again, to what
extent the process had anything to do with that I'm not sure.]

While a meritocracy and an open democratic election process don't need
to be at odds, I do think some of our efforts to increase voter turn
out, adding things that seem a bit like debates to the process for one
example, do tilt the expectations in a way that might be at odds with
a meritocracy. Having too much focus on what the voter turn out
actually was is another thing that I think tilts us away from being
governed by a meritocracy.

So the natural evolution of the election process seems to me to result
in an open election with a small number of heavily involved
contributors voting (making the decisions). If we want more voter
participation the best way to preserve the underlying meritocracy is
to get more heavily involved contributors. That number is always going
to be rather small when compared to the number of people we allow to
vote.

John