[WikiEN-l] Election procedures (was Arbitration committee term lengths)

[Michael Snow]

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