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James E. Blair wrote:
> I think our recent experience has shown that the fundamental problem is
> that not all of the members of our community knew what kind of behavior
> we expected around elections.  That's understandable -- we had hardly
> articulated it.  I think the best solution to that is therefore to
> articulate and communicate that.
> 
> I believe Anita's proposal starts off by doing a very good job of
> exactly that, so I would like to see a final resolution based on that
> approach with very similar text to what she has proposed.  That
> statement of expected behavior should then be communicated by election
> officials to all participants in announcements related to all elections.
> Those two simple acts will, I believe, suffice to address the problem we
> have seen.
> 
> I do agree that a heavy bureaucracy is not necessary for this.  Our
> community has a Code of Conduct established and administered by the
> Foundation.  I think we should focus on minimizing additional process
> and instead try to make this effort slot into the existing framework as
> easily as possible by expecting the election officials to forward
> potential violations to the Foundation's Executive Director (or
> delegate) to handle as they would any other potential CoC violation.

+1

The community code of conduct states:

"""Respect the election process. Members should not attempt to
manipulate election results. Open debate is welcome, but vote trading,
ballot stuffing and other forms of abuse are not acceptable."""

Maybe just clarifying what we mean by "open debate" and giving examples
of what we would consider "other forms of abuse" in the context of the
TC elections is actually sufficient. Then voters can judge abuse on
their own in their vote (reputational pressure) *and* we have an
established process (the alleged violation of the community code of
conduct) to escalate to in case we really need to (institutional pressure).

I think the first part of Anita's draft captures that very well, so
maybe that's all we need. I really think that documenting and better
communicating expectations will actually avoid problems in the future.

Regards,

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)