Open Stack

Doug Hellmann wrote:
> John Davidge wrote:
>> 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.

Yeah, sorry for the poor choice of words, I didn't mean that candidates
are trying to deceive anyone. I only meant that in my experience, past
members of the TC were overly optimistic in their campaign emails about
how much they thought they would be able to achieve. So looking at the
past track record is important.

>> A poll in the weeks leading to the self-nomination period could
>> be used to identify the issues people are most concerned about, and
>> candidates could be encouraged to address those issues directly in their
>> self-nominations. This would reduce the reliance on a potentially messy
>> question and answer period by pre-empting the greatest concerns.

If my memory serves well, I think Anita (anteaya) drove such a
structured discussion in a past election (identify key issues and ask
candidates to address those questions in their candidacy email). Maybe
she can give us a summary of how well that went.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)