Getting out the vote for the Fedora 10 election season

[Jonathan Roberts]

> So what sort of things can we do? And when should we start doing them?

1) Everything you've suggested below, 2) we should start asap, some
things are going to be more long range and some more targeted to the
time frame around the elections.
>
> As a start is there a general need to raise the awareness of the
> election and voting process we are using?
> Can we generate general interest material covering topics like:
> Why vote? How do you qualify for voting? What's this range voting stuff?

Yes. I'd suggest this is something we should tackle *now*. I'll even
volunteer to write something tomorrow and bring it to the mktg meeting
tomorrow for feedback.

>
> And where do we want to put material in an effort to increase awareness?

Heh, my suggestion for this would be news.fp.o if it existed! The only
reason I mention it now is that I think it ties in a little with the
recent discussions about the opening of RHM - this is one set of
material that would definitely belong on a Fedora specific site. In
fact, election promotion in general would be perfect material for
news.fp.o

In lieu of that, however, I'd suggest we ask websites for a static
page for this content. It's stuff that will be perennially useful, so
we might as well make it look presentable and easily accessible.

>
> Community Q/A:
> This is the one thing I've been thinking about a lot myself. I think
> we can try to encourage people to ask questions they want the
> candidates to answer as a way to frame the election and give all the
> candidates a better idea of what the voting community cares about.
>
> It's sort of a two part problem. One we just need to get people out
> there to ask questions. I think this comes down to communicating why
> each election matters.  Can we do that as a marketing campaign? Can we
> "sell" the election process?

This is something that I think would be perfect to start preparing
about a month before the election. If we advertise for questions in
the usual project spaces (as well as the non-usual - perhaps fedora
forums etc?), giving a deadline for when questions will be accepted
and another deadline for when candidates' answers will be published,
it will help drive a sense of anticipation (maybe a slightly strong
word!) but provide a measure of certainty too.

>
> And second, we need a way to organize those questions and resulting
> candidate answers so they are easily found. I've been talking to
> people specifically about how to organize some sort of community to
> candidate q/a.  Nigel seems to have taken the bait and has a plan on
> how to integrate community questions AND nominations into the voting
> app for all elections.

Would be a cool idea so that people could review when they're voting.
As well as that, I'd suggest we could use the normal system I've used
in the past for interviews: a wiki page with bold for questions and
normal for answers, tagged with names at the beginning of each line.
We could publish questions/answers over a few days/weeks to drum up
further interest.

> Nominations:
> This was talked about a lot in the post-Board election fab discussion,
> and it was generally agreed that encouraging people to nominate others
> would help increase the candidate pool, because some people are not
> inclined to self-nominate. How do we go about encouraging people to
> nominate other people? I don't know exactly beyond blogging about it
> again.

I guess we could include it in the election info material you've
suggested earlier, and make it clear that it's something we're
actively encouraging people to do. Again, I'm not certain here.

> IRC Debate:
> Another idea floating around is organizing a candidate debate for each
> election.  I can't take credit for this idea.  It should be doable. My
> main concerning is how to generate the questions/topics for a debate
> format.  This loops to my personal focus on trying to find a way
> generate questions from the community for candidates to answer.   If
> you've got an idea on how to run a candidate debate for any of the
> elections, feel free to chime in.

The panel/moderator/audience model would probably be a good one to
follow, something similar to the monthly board meetings? I nominate
Max to moderate as he does a pretty good job already!
>
> Meet the Candidate Videos:
> If candidates wanted to make introductory videos can we organize a
> space for candidates videos that makes it easier for people to find?

Fedora TV. Kushal, what do you think?

Jon