Re: Eleven good candidates

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Ali Abdin <ALIABDIN aucegypt edu> writes:

> Umm - I thought that the 'big GNOME' hackers were not going to announce 
> who they are voting for...
> 
> That was the whole reason we decided to make the votes private until the 
> results have been tallied and announced.
>
> Now I think we might see some polarization (where people go and vote for 
> somebodyt just because they trust the judgement of the GNOME hackers)

I as understand it, the reason for not publishing the votes
immediately until the results are final is to avoid penalizing
people who vote early. That is, we wanted to avoid the situation
where somebody would hold off voting until next Wednesday and say

 "I was going to vote for X, but he has only three votes,
  so let me vote for Y instead, since Y has a chance to be
  elected."

This would be unfair to the people who had voted for X earlier.
I don't believe that the rule was meant to avoid "influence".

If thinking of it as seeing my votes in advance bothers you,
please think of it as 11 brief endorsements. A considerable
number of endorsements have been made already, so hopefully you
are comfortable with that activity.

While I trust that nobody will vote for a candidate solely
because I or Havoc or whoever has said that they think they would
do a good job on the board, I have been lucky enough to have the
opportunity to meet many of the candidates in person, and to work
with them in the day-to-day life of GNOME. And having had that
opportunity, I felt that I should point out some of the people
who's strength may not consist of posting thousands of messages
to public mailing lists in order to get name recognition but who
have been doing great work for GNOME.

People are free to either use or ignore that information as they
see fit.

Regards,
                                        Owen