Getting out the vote for the Fedora 10 election season

[Jeff Spaleta]

Okay campers, I'm here to try to jump start a discussion on what we
can do to encourage people to participate in the upcoming Fedora
election season.

Lets see what we can do to encourage people to participate in the
upcoming elections which will be held in Dec or Jan ( depending on F10
schedule changes)  This time around we are having multiple elections
at the same time. Doing it this way allows us to make a concerted push
to increase the community awareness of all the elections/votes. For
reference see:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-advisory-board/2008-September/msg00080.html

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

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?

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

I've been persuaded into thinking we should try to start doing
whatever it is we want to do about a month before the elections, to
increase candidate as well as voter turn out.

There's probably more elaborate things to do as well. Below are my
more detailed thoughts on ideas I've heard or I've been actively
thinking about myself.  Yes,  I know its long...but this time I gave
you fair warning.  If you have other ideas on what to do, feel free to
jump in to the thread.


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?

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.

Try to ignore my overly complicated suggestion, and take a look at
Nigel's response on this ticket:
https://fedorahosted.org/elections/ticket/20#comment:1

He says he may be able to have this in place by early November. If
this becomes available he also suggests we could open up q/a and
nominations 3 to 4 weeks before the elections.   If this functionality
becomes available this could be a focus for a "get out the vote"
campaign.

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.

Nigel is way ahead of me on this and is already thinking about trying
to support nominations in the voting app to reduce the administrative
overhead.  See: https://fedorahosted.org/elections/ticket/23


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.

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?

Okay that's it from me.  Thoughts?

-jef