Re: Ideas for improving GNOME board elections

[Pascal Terjan <pterjan gmail com>]

On Fri, 3 May 2019 at 09:30, Allan Day <aday gnome org> wrote:
> Hi Membership Committee,

Hi,
I have never run the election and so am definitely not the best person
to respond, but given the silence I'll try

> I'm writing to you in my capacity as a Foundation Director. The Foundation Board has recently discussed 
> some ideas for how to improve the board elections, which we would love to hear your feedback on.
>
> Some of the areas we are interested in improving are:
>
> Increasing engagement and discussion around the elections, in particular with more debate and discussion.
> Ensuring that the elections are accessible, so that everyone is able to cast their votes in an informed 
> manner.
> Ensuring clarity over which candidacies are valid.
>
> We've discussed some ideas for how to improve in these areas, including:
>
> 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

> 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

> 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

> 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

> We'd love to hear what you think of these ideas, and whether you think that any of them could be 
> implemented, either for the current elections or in the future, and we'd be happy to have a short call to 
> discuss them, if you think that would be helpful.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Allan