[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 40, Issue 9

[Andrew Gray]

On 03/07/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thoughts?
>
> Take a look at the DSU Steering Committee rulings page
> (http://steering.dsu.org.uk/rules/rulings.php) - it is full of
> election rule violations. Whatever they are doing, it isn't working. I
> would advise against using Durham Student Union as a role model.

Ha. Yes, it does fall down a lot when you have *candidates* allowed
into the system.

Trust me, I made plenty of those rulings myself, I know what's behind
them... indeed, if you look down towards the bottom of the list, I'll
have signed the originals of several of them.

That level of candidate idiocy and whining is about the same as you
get for any similar body, collegiate system or not, IME. Very few of
those are structural-related; they're variously to do with candidate
misbehaviour (People are *really inventive* at that, as you can
imagine) or with non-election issues. Running through the last year's
worth in reverse order...

Administrivia; election publicity x8; administrivia; election process;
administrivia; election publicity; election process x2; administrivia.

Of those, the three "election process" are just faff over whether or
not a candidate nomination got in in time; the "election publicity" is
mostly to do with our arcane system for handling how *candidates* are
allowed to canvass. As WMF doesn't permit canvassing, this is moot :-)
A couple are to do with whether or not a candidate is allowed to say
where they're from, which is not an issue we'd have - there's no point
in disguising it.

Nothing in there is related to the "separate groups, devolved running"
system in a way that would have any meaning in the WMF context, with
the exception of one good-faith error of someone saying "go vote (...)
by the way, so-and-so from here is standing, so you know", and
assuming we don't leave complete muppets in charge of 'campaigning',
we should be able to avoid most of that.

I still think the model has a lot going for it.

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