[Foundation-l] Election mailings

[Andrew Gray]

[duplicate; sent to Oscar originally by accident]

On 06/07/07, oscar van dillen <oscarvandillen at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 7/5/07, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > I would prefer an appointed board to "elected representatives" that
> > came out of a badly-publicised, badly-attended, badly-arranged,
> > election; they would probably be just as effectively selected and we
> > wouldn't have the embarrasment of an 'election' with a meaningless
> > turnout.
>
> dear andrew,
>
> just for clarity: are you implying these elections are "badly-publicised,
> badly-attended, badly-arranged"?

I do think we're doing a lot of things wrong we could be doing better,
and I do think we're dealing rather incompetently with what was a
successful attempt to get them running better.

A lot of people are making a great deal of fuss, but it's worth
remembering that the *actual recipients*, on the whole, didn't object.
Greg got several complaints back - but on examination, almost all of
those were from the "foundation community", people who are closely
involved with the governance discussions and knew about it anyway. The
people in the broader community, those who've never heard of
foundation-l or its ilk - the responses appear pretty universally
positive.

I think this closely resembles the problems we had with "advertising!"
complaints in January - a relatively small group of users close to the
centre of the project are making a lot of noise. Whilst they're good
people, their objections are honestly held and they have sensible
grounds for making them, we need to remember that "a lot of
complaining on foundation-l" or "a lot of argument in #wikimedia" is
not always representative of the opinion of the broader community.

> well, i myself do not like advertisements in general; don't you agree your
> proposals will also lead to more aggressive campaigning in the future, and
> candidates filling village pumps and talk pages everywhere with posters,
> "ads everywhere" so to say?
> now imho that would be a *real* "beauty-contest" if we've ever had one...

There's an important distinction between promoting the candidates and
promoting the election. What I'd like to see is a well-run campaign to
get the word out that there is an election, that it matters to the
community, that it is important the community votes and talks about it
and does something when it has the chance.

But none of this means the *candidates* get to campaign. They should
stay quiet and aloof - I applaud that, I think it makes for a much
more honest election, one that isn't trying to be swayed by fancy
trickery.  We don't lower the tone by having them try to dump things
into a soundbite or attack each other over petty issues; we don't
encourage spamming by letting them canvass. They sit tight, and all
the debate is carried on *by the voters*, in the community.

I very much like the discreet nature of the campaigning we have now,
as far as the candidates are concerned - there basically isn't any at
all beyond their private conversations with people. They state their
platforms in a balanced and equal environment, they perhaps gather
publicly for a debate or a series of speeches (though that one's a
little less practical on-wiki), they answer questions somewhere public
but clearly marked out, and then they stand back and let it all roll
along.

We should promote the election. But we shouldn't let the candidates
promote themselves. Big difference.

[And, yes, I would like to see a vigorous attempt to promote the
election, and I think it would be most efficient if each project was
left to its own devices to do it, within reason. Let them experiment,
let them compete, let's see what we can come up with. Centralisation
is slow, and often simple failures go unnoticed]

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk