December 2010 Fedora Election Plan

[Robyn Bergeron]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 4:08 AM, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
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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.
>

I think to say that people don't know about elections is kind of a
stretch.  It's historically advertised both on the day voting begins
and the few days prior to voting ending on the various announce lists
as well as the lists where the voting is limited to people in certain
FAS groups (FAMSCo elections are advertised on ambassadors-list, for
example). Additionally, numerous folks blog about the process,
including calls for help, calls for nominations, advertising for town
hall participation, actually voting, saying they voted and including
the 'i voted' graphic, etc. It is also made known via Fedora Weekly
News as well as status-update places like identi.ca, twitter, and
Farmville-central (aka facebook).

Yes, it's entirely possible that people just don't care, or feel that
it doesn't matter who wins, and while the first problem may be solved
with education and raising awareness (see next paragraph), the second
problem inevitably and historically leads us down the road of
governance and the number of electable Board members, which, really,
is a Pandora's box of discussion that doesn't need to be opened at the
moment.

As to the rest of your post: Are you volunteering? Because we have a
few people who have volunteered to moderate town halls, nobody to deal
with questionnaires, and to try and find additional people who want to
encourage candidates to have platforms and make sure that information
is posted to planet or mailing lists, and send daily reminder
mails.... well, we also lack an election wrangler at this point to
find those people.  Of course, we also lack Board approval of the
proposed schedule, and we can't proceed with the schedule (which
starts in a few days) without that anyhow, and we don't know when it
might be approved.

-Robyn

> - --
> Stephen Gallagher
> RHCE 804006346421761
>
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