Re: [gnome-women] Re: Debian elections

[Mary <mary-gnome puzzling org>]

On Sun, Apr 02, 2006, Clytie Siddall wrote:
> This certainly restricts the voting to a small pool. What about all  
> the other people who contribute their time and effort to the project?
> 
> I feel a protest coming on... ;)

This has been raised as a concern by other people before, see for
example Benjamin Mako Hill at http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/2005/Jul/19 .
That argument is, I believe, much of the reason that applying for Ubuntu
*membership* and Ubuntu *maintainership* (for example) are separate
processes. See also criteria for voting in GNOME Foundation elections at
http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/ . (Typically, there is usually
*some* level of involvement required before being given voting rights,
or it's too easy to rig elections or 'steal' a project's resources.)

The most effective protest would probably be working within Debian to
amend the rules to either allow (some) non-developers to vote, or to
change the criteria for a developer. I suspect from Mako's blog entry
that there are some ideas other people have that would be useful. On the
other hand, there's only so much time in the day... ;)

-Mary