FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 10:00 PM, Kevin Kofler<kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>> If the people don't think a politician is properly protecting their
>> interest, than the next election cycle they should vote for someone else.
>
> And this is not possible if all the big parties share the same position and
> the small ones either get eliminated by cutoff rules or end up overvoted
> all the time.
>
> The issue in our case is that I was the only one running on a "KDE as a
> first-class citizen" platform, so there was mathematically no way for
> voters to give a majority to people defending this position. I'll see if I
> can get more KDE SIG people to run for the next election(s) so voters
> actually have a chance of getting their opinion represented by a majority.

Please read more on a) Range voting and b) Arrow's paradox. In a multi
issue voting there is no way you can the results of a vote to be a
mandate one way or another. You can only show that there was some
consensus that people didn't vote against you. And with the fact that
so few people vote you can only show that you have a self-selected
consensus that you were more electable than the other people on the
slate.


>> I ranked you fairly high in the vote, because I thought your voice in
>> support of KDE would be good to have on the board, even though I use
>> Gnome. I am not expecting you to switch to endorsing switching resources
>> from KDE to Gnome if there is a poll that shows more Fedora users use
>> Gnome than KDE.
>
> Don't worry, there's no way I'd start defending GNOME just to get
> elected. ;-)
>
> I do think we need to listen to the consensus of the developers on the
> mailing list to some extent (more than has happened in the past), but I'm
> not going to vote against my electoral promises nor against KDE SIG's
> interests.

If your votes and voice are to alienate all who might have agreed with
you.. then I would say you are working against your SIG's interest.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"