[maemo-community] Getting the ball rolling for council elections, and proposal to lengthen terms

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi,

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 15:29, Dave Neary<dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>> I would also like to propose that we concurrently run a referendum (yes,
>> another one) on lengthening the council's term to one year.
>>
>> From a purely practical point of view, it's a pain in the bum running
>> these elections so often, it eats a bunch of time that could be spent
>> doing other stuff. So it's almost entirely selfish of me.
> 
> Apart from the question about what it is you, and others advocating
> the lengthening, think hasn't been able to have traction on; I'm also
> interested in what it is about running the elections which is so time
> consuming for you and how it can be streamlined.

I think I was clear that this is mostly a selfish decision. Running an
election typically takes some of my time (overall, I'd guess about 3
days now, longer previously because of complications and software
modifications/installation and shell script hacking) to generate &
publish & announce lists of eligible candidates, announce elections,
generate lists of eligible voters & poulate the database with tokens,
send out emails, send out reminders about the election 2 or 3 times,
reply at length to the tmo threads criticising the exclusion of tmo from
the Maemo community, and generate and publish the election results.

The work in making the elections preferential last time was a biggish
job, but quite enjoyable actually.

To put it another way, running an election takes effort from me, from
Henri, from the council, and maybe that effort could be better spent,
instead of having it come up every 6 months?

Also, Andi80 said it best - new council members (unlike yourself) come
in, start getting an idea for what they want the council to be about &
how to make headway, and then there's an election. I'd like being a
member of the council to be less about elections & introspective stuff
and more about outward-facing stuff, helping attach the big issues that
people have, and enabling the community to be more action-based than
talk-based.

> Things like announcements can fall under the jurisdiction of the
> current council chair, but I doubt that's the most time consuming
> thing you've been doing.

Things like announcements are time consuming. And if I can take some
weight off the un-paid council so that they can take care of the
important stuff, I'm happy to do it.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
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