Rebecca wrote:
This election turned into, to put it bluntly, a crapfight, with open season on the candidates. I found it to be a painful experience, and I wasn't even one of the ones being targeted most. I would also seriously consider not running again entirely on that basis, despite the fact that I'm looking forward to getting into my work as an arbitrator. That's why I chose one of the three-year terms - and I believe I'm not the only one.
I think it would be wise to make absolutely damned sure that the events of this election don't happen again before we start talking about shortening the terms of the newly-elected arbitrators, or we may well find next time that we once again won't have enough suitable candidates, or that a certain class of users won't run. Being tremendously thick-skinned shouldn't, IMO, be a requirement for running for arbitrator.
I agree with Ambi that the campaign phase of this election had some serious problems, particularly the handling of the endorsements page. Since I was working on the process, I feel this as a personal failure. Unfortunately, I felt somewhat limited in what I could do because I was acting with no particular official mandate and didn't feel it would help to arrogate the authority to myself. I'm sure the candidates also felt restricted in terms of how much they could do about the deteriorating situation without appearing self-serving, even if they were honestly concerned with the health of the process. As a result, the manner in which endorsements and "disendorsements" were presented was left up to a group of users, several of whom have little interest in the good of the project and are primarily active in stirring up trouble, as a review of their contributions will show.
This would be a good time to review the process and establish some better ground rules for future elections. I like the practice of collecting short candidate statements in one place, leaving them the freedom to post longer statements and have discussions with the community in their own user space. If we continue to have endorsements, I think a similar principle can apply there. Let people who want to make public endorsements use their own user pages for that purpose, and perhaps collect a list of links to those pages. Anything more than that becomes an unreadable VfD-style page and bogs down in the attacks that get flung back and forth. Just because some people want the opportunity to air their grudges with particular candidates does not entitle them to maximum exposure of their grievances.
--Michael Snow