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 -- Fedora-marketing-list mailing list Fedora-marketing-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
