Re: Ideas for improving GNOME board elections

[Allan Day <aday gnome org>]

Thanks for the reply, Pascal, and sincere apologies for my own slow response.

Pascal Terjan <pterjan gmail com> wrote:
...
> > Having a template that candidates have to fill in, with short questions on subjects like availability, 
> > relevant expertise and personal priorities.
>
> Sounds good and easy to implement: adding the template on the wiki and
> linking to it in the announcement email model which is on
> https://wiki.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/ElectionsHowTo#Announcing_the_upcoming_elections
> (updating the CANDIDACY section which currently just lists a few
> things to include in the email)
>
> The main work would be to decide on the relevant questions

Great. I can talk to the rest of the board about providing a draft
list of questions.

> > Making all the candidacy statements available in one place, such as a web page (ideally linked from the 
> > voting page)
>
> There is already a webpage, for example
> https://vote.gnome.org/2018/candidates.html

Ah great! For some reason we weren't aware of that.

> > Have prepared questions that are pitched to the candidates, possibly written by the existing board or 
> > outgoing board members
>
> Having more (useful) questions would indeed be good, the quality and
> amount of questions asked tend to vary.
> I think the board would definitely be better positioned to write
> relevant questions as they are the ones to know everything important
> going on and have some experience on the kind of problems elected
> candidates will have to work on

OK. I assume that there wouldn't be much for the membership committee
to do, if the board where to prepare questions. We'd just need to make
sure that you were happy for us to do it.

> > Having the membership committee advertise the time (and time zone) of the deadline for candidacy 
> > announcements, and possibly have them validate the candidacies
>
> I am confused here, the deadline is in the announcement email
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2017-May/msg00002.html

Sorry, we must have missed this!

Looking through the foundation-announce archive, one thing that occurs
to me is that there is no dedicated discussion period in the election
time-line: voting opens as soon as the candidate list is finalised. I
wonder if that would be worth consideration.

Thanks again,

Allan