On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 14:22 -0400, Elliot Lee wrote: > I agree with a lot of the points made, but I think it's important to > look at this in perspective: > > The main reason for having elections is to pick managers & leaders > (the two are not the same). > The Fedora Extras project is much smaller than, say, a country :) So > the elections should be much less of a deal. > In a perfect world we would only have elections when the current > FESCO was not doing a good job. > In this real world, there is still no need to have an election if > there are not more non-contingent candidates than there are positions > to fill. > Very true. however, there is one other reason to hold elections -- to legitimize the regime^H^H^H^H^H^H governing body :-) I think in the wake of the decision that the Fedora Foundation was going to cause too many fiscal and legal problems, this was the strongest reason motivating non-FESCo members to ask for an election. To reafirm the community aspect of the Fedora Project. My impression is also that the strongest reason from within FESCo was the feeling that FESCo could be doing more things with new members that had a fresh outlook and more time and energy to devote to pushing projects. So in this case the perfect world needs and the political needs of the community coincided. A new question would then be: how do we balance voter burnout (why do we vote all the time?) with feeling of community control (why haven't we voted in a long time?) and the efficiency of FESCo (replace people too often and they spend all their time trying to get elected rather than running the project) with burnout (replace them infrequently and they begin to have more important things to work on and stop participating.) > When you have a project as full of smart people as Fedora is, the > differences between candidates will be > very minor, so the incentive for people to vote and take part will > be very small. There's also probably the perception > (correct or not) that not much is at stake in the FESCO election, > which also minimizes the incentive to participate. > In particular, we should make it clearer why people would choose to > vote for one candidate versus another. If it > doesn't matter which one you vote for, there's no point in having an > election, and we are just all running around > trying to play model UN. :) Yeah -- I definitely see this. OTOH, having scheduled elections as the traditional method of changing FESCo membership means that when there are larger issues, there is an established method for effecting change. So maybe we should have elections on a non-disruptive timescale and not worry about low voter turn-out; it just means we're making choices that the voters generally agree with. > Here are the things that could be done: > . Do better messaging around the election. Tell voters and potential > candidates why participating matters - what's at stake? What is at stake? In general, elections will make sure the community has a voice and get fresh participants to drive forward new issues in FESCo. In particular, an election is probably about the issues that concern the individual candidates as their the ones who will be driving proposals forward. > . Don't hold elections too often - it sucks time away from more > important stuff Would yearly elections where all seats are up for grabs be better? Having 6 month elections means people have to interrupt their workflow twice a year even if their seat isn't up for election. > . Maybe only hold elections when > . Focus on recruiting & retaining people as Fedora Extras > contributors, because poor election turnout may be a sign of > generally bad project health. (Or a healthy project that is too > dependant on a few key contributors...) That would be worrisome. The question is can we tell this from the election results? Maybe it is a separate issue. Or maybe having elections is an attempt to retain contributors by giving them a voioce in the decision making process. -Toshio
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