election software

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 18:46 -0700, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote: 
> On Wed, 2008-10-08 at 13:15 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> 
> > Was any cost / benefit analysis done on this?
> 
> Not to my knowledge.
> 
> > Aside from one board member's interest in it has anyone expressed this as
> > an actual need that should be filled?
> > 
> > Was that need from the voters perspective or the running members
> > perspective?
> > 
> > Are people running for the board getting inundated with questions?
> > 
> > Do we expect the question system to increase voter turnout?  How?
> 
> Without hunting the archives, there were several discussions around the
> last Board election that people wanted a way to ask questions of the
> candidates.  But I dunno, maybe if you look at it you'll find that it
> was three people making all the noise. :D

To sum it up, and without going back and scouring archives, we received
a number of complaints from community members both inside and outside
Red Hat that elections for FESCo and the Board aren't informed by
understanding where nominees stand on any issues.  The complaints were
that voters have no information on which to make informed choice, but
rather vote for whom they recognize, meaning the results will always be
slanted toward people who happen to be getting paid to work on Fedora
all the time.

I remember specifically suggesting in a Board meeting that community
questions could just as easily be picked up on a wiki page and then
answers solicited from the nominees.  By suggesting that option I was
hoping that we would not let "scalability" get in the way of
responsiveness to the community.  I think scalability is a very good
thing, but we're trying to solve an unquantified problem with an equally
unquantified solution.  That's sometimes unavoidable when dealing with
qualitative issues like community satisfaction.

As I recollect that conversation, we agreed that collecting questions on
the wiki was the right way to go in the short term, and that the amount
of community response would determine whether we pursued something more
comprehensive.

-- 
Paul W. Frields
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
  http://paul.frields.org/   -  -   http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
  irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug
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