Re: GNOME Foundation elections!

[Daniel Veillard <Daniel Veillard w3 org>]

> - October 16 (Monday): Deadline for submitting slates for the
> elections.  Deadline for making changes to the charter.

   Ouch only 2/3 weeks from this preannouncement to have all
the slates constitued.
   Why slates too ? Can't this just be an election of individuals
especially with so little experience and notice. It's a congress
why not have a list of runners and let people pick X names from
the list and declare elected the X most cited persons ? this is
direct democracy and limits the political aspects.

> 4.  Putting together slates.
> As outlined in the charter, registered voters will elect a slate of
> board members and there is a process by which members can submit
> slates.  Hopefully there'll be a number of slates from which
> GNOME hackers can choose. I believe that the GNOME Steering Committee
> will also submit a slate for the board.  Hopefully, slates will be
> submitted with a note explaining why the proposed board composition will
> best meet our needs.
> 
> 5.  Election mechanics.
> There are 2 ways to have the elections:
> - "the basics": we set up a mailman list, auto-subscribe all the
> registered voters to the list, limit posts to the list to members of the
> list, and then ask everybody to send email to the list address (let's
> call it vote gnome org) with a slate number as the subject field.  When
> the election is closed, we can then do a quick check to make people
> didn't double-vote, and tally the results.  This is very simple, very
> open (anyone can inspect the ballots), and no machinery is required;

  yes there is a machinery, at another level, how do you plan to
get the slates made ??? Surprizingly the Steering Committee will
submit a slate, sounds a bit fishy to me, sorry !

> - "the fancy way": people have expressed the desire to have a voting
> process where one could vote for more than one slate, with a first and
> second preference.  To explain this: take the US presidential
> elections.  Wouldn't it be great if people could vote for Ralph Nader
> (or whoever) and, if Nader doesn't get enough votes, then your vote goes
> to Gore or Bush.  This encourages people to state their real voting
> preferences as opposed to voting 'strategically', but it requires more
> complicated machinery. If someone wants to take the lead to identify
> software that can help with this, or come up with a manageable way of
> tallying the votes under such a system, then we can go this route.
> Otherwise, I recommend sticking with the basics for this election
> cycle.   We would need to make a decision on this over the next week or
> so, since it might affect what kind of slates are put together.
> 
> So rather than having a heated debate about this, if someone is really
> excited about going the fancy way, please find software or propose a
> concrete way to do this within the proposed timeline.

  I hate this slate thing. Basically if there is 4 candidates I would
like to see elected, but they are on different slates I can only vote
for 1 (or 2 in the second case) of them. Damn that's frustrating espcially
if X is like 10. Or do you expect all the "big names" to be in the same
slate ;-)
  You also didn't explained one of the crucial aspects of the vote, 
Suppose Slate A has 200 votes and Slate B 100 votes. Is the resulting
board made of 2/3 of slate A and 1/3 or Slate B (which requires ordering
in the slates then) or Slate A is declared winner alone. in the second 
case and assuming the Board propose a slate, then I feel it's simply
not fair. All bets would immediately go to this slate, drop the elections
in that case and autoelect the board we will all loose less time.

  So I think that there is a lot of thing still in grey areas, and 
a 2 week deadline sounds really really short !

Daniel

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