[openstack-dev] [elections][tc]Thoughts on the TC election process

Doug Hellmann doug at doughellmann.com
Tue Oct 4 16:44:27 UTC 2016


Excerpts from John Davidge's message of 2016-10-04 14:44:00 +0000:
> Thierry Carrez wrote:
>
> >Edward Leafe wrote:
> >> [...]
> >> The current candidacy essay would now be posted in the campaign
> >> period,
> >>rather than at the time of nomination, and should exclude the sort
> >>of
> >>biographical information that is currently the most important piece
> >>for
> >>many people. [...]
> >
> >As other mentioned, this is unlikely to give good results -- the
> >track
> >record of the person is much more important than what they pretend to
> >care about in campaign emails (or their mastery of written English).
>

[...]

> Thierry, I'm surprised by your open hostility towards candidates.
> Accusing
> people of 'pretending' to care about things that they've taken the
> time to

This is an excellent example of needing to know the speaker, as
well as their words, and why anonymous elections for leaders
are a bad idea generally and favor native English speakers over
other members of our community.

In this case, I know that Thierry is French and, while his English
is better than I could ever hope my French to be, he sometimes makes
"interesting" word choices, especially where the French and English
words are close in spelling or pronunciation, if not quite so close in
meaning.

In French, "prétendre" has a connotation of "profess" or simply
"say", which is very different from the more negative connotation
of "pretend" in English where common use implies some false intent.
Knowing Thierry and his past contributions well enough to trust his
good intentions, I was able to look past the awkward phrasing to
ask what message he was trying to convey.

Removing the information about who is making a statement eliminates
that sort of context, and means that any history we have of working
together as individual humans can't be used to help our judgment when
we're communicating with each other.

Doug



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