Open Stack

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). In
campaign emails, people always promise they have a lot of time on their
hands, or they will change everything (or "be proactive"). But when the
rubber hits the road, some vote one hour before the meeting, and some
others don't show up at all. Campaign emails only bind those who believe
in them. In my voting I prefer to consider the past availability and
interest in those issues, the positions held on various threads and
reviews, and the cooperative behavior (or absence thereof) exhibited in
those discussions.

Now, it's true that a lot of people vote on names, and don't take the
time to dig into meeting logs and governance reviews. I'm not sure it's
easy to fix though... you can't force people to spend time researching
candidates. We could reduce the electorate to people more likely to have
time to do that research (raise the bar in number of patches you have to
contribute before you can vote) -- but that would require significant
changes in the Foundation bylaws (where the "1 contributor = 1 vote"
principle in carved in protected sections).

Another path would be to facilitate that research. We could publish
meeting presence metrics, but that would only encourage people to make
random noise at meetings. We could ask incumbents to post a "here is
what I did over the last year at the TC" as part of their platform
email. Other ideas ?

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)