On 05/06/09 07:14, Valerie Bubb Fenwick wrote: > We would like to understand the lack of voter turnout. Was > the system too hard to use/set-up?
At each election we get some complaints from a small number of people who say voting is difficult. I know for a fact, especially among the user groups, that many people don't even attempt it due to the complexity. Now, the vast majority of those Members dropped off the voting roles in late March, so this will probably not be a big problem next year. But as we grow over time to engage more users and non-engineers, I think we'll have to consider making the voting process easier. > Were core contributors > not interested in the election? After five years on the project, I find that governance is of interest to a very small number of people in the community (and I no longer see that as a problem). And, yes, I think many CCs were not interested in the election. That's why I think we as a community should try to keep the Membership small and active until we can iron out our governance processes to potentially handle a larger Membership in the future. Currently, we have about 15K people spread out over 350 lists. ogb-discuss has about 200 people, which is not necessarily a small list but it's significantly smaller than the core project lists that have well over a thousand people each. Making governance (and especially the election process) a higher profile in the community will require a significant increase in communications from the OGB to the community. > Or were they not aware their > participation was needed and expected? I think the Facilitation Project will help a lot, along with using members at opensolaris.org as a direct channel at least to the Membership (those who have to take action in elections). And, of course, I think we ought to consider passing the proposed constitution next year to simply governance for everyone. Jim -- http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/
