Re: the votes are in

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Martin,

I'm probably the biggest fan of slates around here, but it's really obvious to me
that we're not anywhere near consensus that it's the right way to go.  The purpose
of the strawpoll, at least in my mind, was not to see if we could get 51% of
people to vote one way or another, but to clarify where we as a group stand.
Looking at the votes on the poll, but more importantly, reading the thread from
the last few days, it's very clear to me that most people would prefer to just
have straightforward elections and vote for the people they like.

So I don't see the need to put more and more energy into this strawpoll.  Maybe
55% will go along with the charter.  Maybe not.  But if we change to a non-slate
election system, I feel comfortable that there will be rough consensus (ie. 80 to
90% support) around the charter and the elections.  So that's where I want to put
my energy.

Bart



Martin Baulig wrote:

> Bart Decrem <bart eazel com> writes:
>
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > Thanks to everyone who voted in the strawpoll and to the people who
> > weighed in on the issue of whether the board should be elected as a
> > slate.
> >
> > 27 people voted in the strawpoll:
> > -14 in favor of the charter, including the slate
> > -13 opposed to the charter, those who explained themselves all said it
> > was because of the slates feature.
> >
> > Based on the results of the strawpoll and the posts on this list,
> > I think it's obvious that the GNOME community wants to elect a board of
> > directors by voting for individual members.
>
> Well, you know, I'm a strong supporter of the slate model and if the
> community doesn't like it, then of cause we need to honor this and change
> the charter accordingly.
>
> However, I don't think a 14/13 vote _for_ the slate model is a good enough
> reason to change everything now.
>
> I just looked at the membership list of this mailing list and found out that
> we have 126 people on it, so only ~20% of them voted.
>
> Can't we just wait a few days and give more people a chance to vote.
>
>                                   * * *
>
> As a final note, we spend a lot of work on our current charter draft, and I
> think we should ask on gnome-hackers (and maybe even gnome-devel-list) as well
> to get a better idea whether people like the current charter or not.
>
> What I dislike a lot at the current strawpoll is the fact that it looks to
> me that only or at least mostly "uninformed" people voted "No".
>
> I mean, when we ask people to vote for something, we also need to tell them
> what they're going to vote for.
>
> So this mail to g-h must include at least
>
> a) a link to the current draft of the charter
>
> b) short outline of our plans regarding elections etc.
>
> c) why we want to have slates (written by a supporter of the slate model)
>
> d) why we dont' want to have slates (written by an opponent of the slate model)
>
> And at this point we should also give people who already voted a chance to
> vote again, thus simply restarting the strawpoll from scratch.
>
> --
> Martin Baulig
> martin gnome org (private)
> baulig suse de (work)