Re: GNOME Foundation elections!

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Joe Shaw <joe helixcode com> writes: 
> Yeah, with a vote of so many potential slates, it may be necessary to have
> run-off elections between the top vote-getters until we can get to a clear
> winner. Perhaps we should add provisions to the charter for this?
> 

The "fancy vote" is just a shortcut to this; you would rank slates
in order of preference, and then we can "simulate" a runoff without
having to actually get everyone to vote again.

I think the script to count fancy votes is totally trivial, assuming
email in a sane format, so I think we should do that. It would be lame
to have the winning slate with only 1/4 of the vote.

I don't remember if the charter specified secret ballots or not; if
they are secret, our life is more complicated. If public I propose
that we vote by simply sending mail to an archived mailing list on
gnome.org. If secret, things are really a lot more complicated. I
remember this being discussed, but not sure we came to a conclusion.

I'd propose a mailing list with the following properties:

 - official foundation announcements only; it would have 
   calls for nominations, calls for votes, announcements of each 
   nomination, voting results, and the minutes from board meetings. 
 - we batch-subscribe everyone in membership.txt, but let anyone join 
   later if they want, or the membership.txt people can change their 
   subscription address
 - moderated, to be sure it is pretty low-traffic, announcements only,
   and no bogus announcements

This is the list you have to read if you want to know about votes and
things; if you're on it, you know what's going on; if you're not on
it, no whining about "I didn't know about XYZ."

Then we should have a separate mailing list for discussion; for that
I'd propose simply repurposing this list from "plan foundation" to
"discuss foundation matters."

I'll create the mailing list by Monday if there are no objections, and
we can send the call for nominations out there in addition to
Gnotices.

Havoc