[maemo-community] Election process referendum

[From: markus.schn at yahoo.com]

Hello,

Just for your consideration...

Dave Neary wrote:
> I did some tests on the voting data last year - of people who had a
> karma of 3 (that is, 9000 people who created a maemo.org account, and
> never did anything else) the vast majority (I don't have exact figures,
> but it was over 95% - I can work them out again if people are
> interested) didn't vote.

We should all keep in mind, that with the karma limit of 25 *at least* 1/3 of all the people who voted last time will be taken their voice, given that ~600 people have enough karma and ~900 people voted last time. Maybe you can pull out the number of people who actually voted with karma >25 to have the exact ratio.

So if (at least) 1/3 of the people who voted last time where "non contributors", showed the interest to participate in an election, I would think that this is an significant number of people to consider.

> And my perception of the council was exactly what Graham says here: it is supposed to represent contributors, not users.

It's the "Community Council", so it boils down to the question if a "regular user" can be part of the community (i.e. without contributing in karma friendly areas) or if it should be "Contributors Council". Following Amy Jo Kim these "users" are called Peripheral (Lurkers) or Inbound (Novice) but are yet part of the broader community (by passive observation or sparse contributions, say ITT or IRC). I would claim neither would break the 25 karma barrier, still they might want to feel represented by the possibility to vote (and at least 1/3 of the current electorate seem to have that feeling).

But yes, if the council is only for real contributors the 25 karma limit is appropriate and probably also too low and 50-100 would be more realistic because you can get 25 Karma without *real* contributions. I guess with a karma limit of 100 we should manage to get >90% participation and have definitely only real contributors, if that is a concern.

Markus