Re: let's do a quick vote on the charter

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Chema Celorio <chema celorio com> writes:

> By taking a quick glance at who is voting for no, there seems
> to be a tendency for the people that are a minority (or that
> they think they are) to voto for no. It isn't 100%, as anything
> is politic is. But the people that voted no, tend to either
> not live in the US, not work for one of the Gnome Companies, etc.
> 
> I can also see why slates can help the board be a balanced one,
> by not having slates, the 7 most popular HACKERS will end up in 
> the board. Because the votes for the "doc guys", the "unemployed
> guy" the "european guy" and so on, Will be shared among the group
> of them.

But this exactly is the reason why we want to have slates. When you
vote for individual people, "outsiders" or people who think they're in
a minority won't have any chance to get elected. Most likely they won't
even candidate for election.

However, with the slate model we can make sure to have a balanced board
and we can also do this "we need a doc guy", "we need an unemployed guy"
etc. and thus pick people to be on a slate who won't get elected otherwise.

As Maciej pointed out, the President and Vice President of the US need to
act as a team - and the same applies for the board of directors of the
GNOME Foundation as well.

Whatever slate gets elected need to be a team and the board also needs to
function which means that it needs to have the people who're best suited
for the job and not the people who're the most popular.

Btw. I don't think that the steercom slate will be the winning one; in fact,
I think I'll be the slate which will lose.

I think we must distinguish between a "leader's election" and a "community's
election" here.

If only the current "leaders" and core hackers vote, sure the steercom slate
will win since we'll all vote for it.

However, the election of the board will be done by the community - the
community of people who're contributing to GNOME in the one or other way,
some of them are translators, some other documentation folks, some others
only do marketing stuff.

When we have a slate which will be a balanced representation of the GNOME
community - with all the different groups and regions the community consists
of being represented - then it'll be this slate which'll win.

To win against the steercom slate, you just need to very, very carefully
select the people for your slate, make sure to choose the people who're best
suited for it and thus giving the community the feeling that this slate is
their democratic representation.

> On the other hand, having slates is also not democratic, in the sense
> that as soon as the slates candidates are announced, everyone is
> going to see who "the wining" slate is, even before the voting is done.

It's a question of telling people what they're voting for, why they're voting
and what the foundation will be good for.

Even if all "uninformed" people just blindly vote for the most popular people
or for the slate with the most people on it - then with the vote-for-individual-
people model, the most popular people will get all of the votes and the non-
popular ones non at all; so the situation is even worse without slates.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)