Fedora Board election results

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 21:39 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:15:53 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 2008-06-24 at 12:04 -0600, Stephen John Smoogen wrote:
> > > >> > IMHO, a voter's employer just doesn't matter.
> > > >> >
> > > >>
> > > >> It does if people outside of RH feel they are not going to be
> > > >> recognized or represented and thus give up on the system.
> > > >
> > > > Voting is one of the ways to have them feel recognized and represented.
> > > > If they didn't bother to vote, they gave up that mechanism for
> > > > representation voluntarily.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > That argument is logically valid but humans are not logical. If people
> > > feel that voting is not going to make a difference they will have no
> > > incentive to continue with the process. 
> > 
> > Which is why you ask the community, at large, "Why didn't you vote?"
> 
> I almost decided not to vote this time, because in the list of eight
> nominees I didn't see any real community representatives. I was and I
> still am under the impression that for at least half of the nominees the
> election would become a popularity contest (as in "I know him from various
> places" not limited to IRC, blogs, social networking sites) -- in other
> words a fun event, a virtual pad on the back with only a minority of the
> CLA signers participating in the election, anyway. The Fedora Project has
> grown out of proportions. Almost all essential communication channels are
> flooded, including the Wiki, which still feels like a maze, or the planet,
> where people post English headlines with non-English message bodies. It's
> hard to impossible to stay informed about the various sub projects and
> special interest groups. Vital communication is moved to IRC. I spent
> quite some time on the following Wiki page,
>     https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board/Elections/Nominations
> reading the "Goals" and "Future Plans" again and again, many of which are
> either weak or unconvincing. Especially if you cannot map a person's name
> to political activity on relevant mailing-lists. It's like "okay, I've
> seen that name before, but I don't remember any valuable political
> contributions that sounded promising and would justify voting for that
> person [again]". Is the person competent? How do I know if I've not seen
> any activity before?

I distill that down to:

"Candidates need to provide more concrete examples of their past work"

and

"Candidates should already be doing (or trying to do) what they are
talking about in their platform statements."

Both I think are very good points.

> Further, Red Hat fills several board seats
> anyway. Fedora is Red Hat's baby. Red Hat still has to prove how serious
> they take the Fedora community. I thought about the previous board
> members. Did they perform well? Where are the testing instruments to
> decide whether a particular member performed well? As a voter, what can I
> do to vote _against_ somebody? Other than to give zero points and, from
> the few nominees, vote for somebody else who will then disappoint me?

I'm not going to bite on the Red Hat topic.

> In the end I voted, but used only a small fraction of my voting points.
> A bit like participation and boycott at the same time.

At least you voted!  The newly elected members and candidates for the
next election would do well to listen to what you've said here and try
to correct it.

josh