I'm sure most of you have seen the Central Notice already (and hopefully clicked through) but for those who haven't, or keep putting it off the steward elections (and confirmations) are in full swing and will continue until 23:59 (UTC) on February 28th 2010. The elections can be found here<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2010> . You can see manually updated statistics (similar to Pathoschilds last year with examples of oppose reasons etc) at Stewards/elections_2010/Statistics<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewar… well as an automatic tool at http://toolserver.org/~stewardbots/elections.php<http://toolserver.org/%…hp>. As for a "brief" summary without looking at the link: The stated requirements for election are: at least 30 supporting votes and an 80% support percentage (and of course approval of the Board of Directors. So far we have 8 candidates well into the passing zone (above 90%) : Dferg (98.2%) Wutsje (98.1%) Jyothis (97.2%) Mercy (97.2%) J.delanoy (96.3%) Sir Lestaty de Lioncourt (96%) Avraham/Avi (94.6%) All 8 have minimal opposes but those that are opposing are generally doing so with complaints that they are "career" wiki(p/m)edians and/or have to many hats and power. There is also one person who has opposed all candidates (because he does not like the open voting). We also 2 candidates currently between 80 and 85%: Mentifisto at 84.1% Annabel at 82.1% Mentifisto has gone down a bit recently with complaints about past interactions and "setting himself up" for the position. Annabel has also gone down more recently with most of the opposes complaining about a lack of recent activity. There are three candidates between 70 and 80% (not currently passing): Jamesofur 74.2% EivindJ 74.1% Billinghurst 73.8% All three candidates have been moving around the 70-78% range a fair bit over the past couple days and both EivindJ and Jamesofur have a large amount of Neutral votes mostly expressing similar opinions to the opposes. The biggest concerns for Jamesofur are for a lack of experience sprinkled with some concerns about languages and a lack of edits. Most of the opposition for EivindJ is a lack of activity and worry that that would continue if selected as a steward. Billinghurst started strongly but has fallen down amid concerns about language skills and cross wiki activity. There is one candidate (Carkuni) who is currently at about 66.7% and has support because of their Japanese language skills but has had significant opposition for a lack of cross wiki activity. After Carkuni there is an enormous drop off with 2 candidates at 30-35%, 2 in the 15-20% range and the rest sub 10% (with 7 still at 0%). The current steward confirmations<http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stewards/confi… also ongoing and while I haven't been collecting complete stats about that they have been getting a significant amount of comments and discussion. So far there are at least 4-5 stewards where there is discussion about whether they should be removed for inactivity (with some believing that those who are still trusted should retain the tools and others wanting to remove them if they aren't being used.) Unless everyone is already bored out of their mind and tells me know I'll send out another update along these lines in a week or so to show how it is progressing. While I'm obviously kind of biased in the matter I encourage everyone who hasn't done so yet to consider researching the candidates and expressing your opinions so that we can get as many opinions as possible for everyone running. User:Jamesofur James Alexander james.alexander(a)rochester.edu jamesofur(a)gmail.com 100 gmail invites and no one to give them to :( let me know if you want one :)