Re: Yes to Publicity! Not to Anonimit! Was: Re: GNOME Foundation Annual Elections - proposal

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

lör 2003-09-13 klockan 09.05 skrev Aleksey Sanin:
> It's well known that one of the reasons that code reviews do imporve
> software quality is the fact that person writing the code knows that 
> someone else will look at what s/he is writing. Knowing that anyone
> (the world) can take a look at your votes will make you think about it
> a little bit more.

And it's exactly this kind of outside influence that we're trying to
avoid with anonymous voting.

When I'm voting, I should be voting on the people *I* as a member truly
believe will be best suited for the board, not what I believe others
will think or expect me to vote on. We are not voting as some kind of
representatives, we are and should be voting based on our own opinion
and beliefs.


> And probably this would help to reduce the number of cases when people
> vote for someone just because s/he has a cute last name :)

Probably even worse and with more impact from a democratic point of view
is when people vote on famous, popular candidates they don't believe in
themselves, just because they expect themselves to be directly or
indirectly criticized if they don't.

If a candidate is well known and respected due to past achievements, but
perhaps not actively involved in GNOME on a frequent basis anymore, it
may be tempting to still give this person a vote, even though I as a
voter know this person may unfortunately not be best suited for the
board now due to the current inactivity in GNOME development.

After all, the board members *should* be actively involved in current
GNOME development(*) so that they know what they're deciding about, but
knowing in detail who's currently actively contributing to GNOME or not
may be (and in many cases are) largely unknown to the great masses that
aren't contributing themselves. If I don't like being criticized for my
actions I may be tempted to vote on famous, popular people instead of
the people I truly belive will be best suited, just so that the masses
on Slashdot and other places will be satisfied with my vote.

Thus, public voting with public accountability is often in direct
conflict with a voting system where every individual voter's own opinion
should be counted and be respected.


Christian



PS. Btw, please disable HTML mail. DS.

(*) http://foundation.gnome.org/overview.html