Do you know someone who would be a great community representative on the Drupal Association board? Are you that someone yourself, but you've hesitated to put yourself forward? Now's the time!
Nominations so far for the at large positions have been, shall we say, a bit slow coming in. So we're extending the nominating period. Nominations are now open until Jan. 29th, 2012.
For background, please read the elections announcement and the nominations page.
We're working on adjusting the rest of the elections timeline so we can still fit in both discussion and voting in time for the Feb. 8th. Here's the current plan:
- Jan. 30th: The full list of candidates and their profiles are posted on association.drupal.org and community questions and discussion begins.
- Feb. 2nd: Voting opens.
- Feb. 7th: Voting closes and two top candidates are announced.
- Feb. 8th: Results go to Drupal Association board for ratification.
If you have any questions, please post as comments here or contact one of the members of the election committee: Angela Byron (webchick), Cary Gordon, or Nedjo Rogers.
Please help get the word out and ensure we have community voices on the board. Thanks!
Comments
Election process
I've got a few comments about the election process sofar, which I think if addressed would help transparency and fairness for the next election. I've set up and run the past few elections for the Linux Australia council and have sat through media coverage for various national elections in a few different countries. I should probably also disclose that my partner has nominated for an at-large position.
First off, you've changed the election timeline after publishing it. If that was done in a government election, I think there'd be riots in the streets ;-) If you give yourself the proviso to change the election dates, you should communicate that very clearly and announce it very publicly (ie: email to all eligible voters).
My second comment is about the reason for changing the dates, insufficient nominations. I think that in the interest of transparency, if you're going to say there weren't enough nominations you should at the very least say how many nominations you've received.
I think best practice would in fact be to publish the nominations as they come in, so constituents actually know who is running from the moment someone nominates. As it stands, there's a black box, which is really not what you want for an election. Well, it's really not what I would want for an election and I doubt that I'm alone in that.
Responding to a couple of
Responding to a couple of those:
1) At the time this was posted, we only had 2 nominees, which seemed a) hardly worth holding an election over :\, and b) to be a huge red flag that there was a general lack of awareness of the nominations process within the community. Extending the timeframe by a few days has allowed us to do more outreach and has resulted in bringing that number to 9, so I think it was a good move. Hopefully next year we'll be able to build off these experiences and have more like 20-30+ eager names to choose from. :)
2) We kicked around whether to publish nominations as they came in vs. all at once. However, my experience both in past DA elections as well as other things such as DrupalCon session voting, etc. is that those applications that are submitted first have more "face time" with the community and thus tend to skew people towards early submitters. We therefore made the decision to do a "big bang" style in order to give everyone equal face time. Something else we could choose to re-evaluate for next year, though.
Yes - in this case I think
Yes - in this case I think publishing all at once was the right move.
A possible compromise might be to just have some kind of public alert that a nomination has been submitted, and a running tally?
Do we have a wiki up somewhere to note "changes for next year?"
Thanks for suggestions
It's important to try to capture these ideas about what we might do differently. E.g., I should have given the number of candidates (2) when I posted this notice about extending the nominating period. There's a wiki page here to capture ideas about what to do differently: http://groups.drupal.org/node/206448.