Rebecca wrote:
This election turned into, to put it bluntly, a
crapfight, with open season on the candidates. I found it to be a
painful experience, and I wasn't even one of the ones being targeted
most. I would also seriously consider not running again entirely on
that basis, despite the fact that I'm looking forward to getting into
my work as an arbitrator. That's why I chose one of the three-year
terms - and I believe I'm not the only one.
I think it would be wise to make absolutely damned sure that the
events of this election don't happen again before we start talking
about shortening the terms of the newly-elected arbitrators, or we may
well find next time that we once again won't have enough suitable
candidates, or that a certain class of users won't run. Being
tremendously thick-skinned shouldn't, IMO, be a requirement for
running for arbitrator.
I agree with Ambi that the campaign phase of this election had some
serious problems, particularly the handling of the endorsements page.
Since I was working on the process, I feel this as a personal failure.
Unfortunately, I felt somewhat limited in what I could do because I was
acting with no particular official mandate and didn't feel it would help
to arrogate the authority to myself. I'm sure the candidates also felt
restricted in terms of how much they could do about the deteriorating
situation without appearing self-serving, even if they were honestly
concerned with the health of the process. As a result, the manner in
which endorsements and "disendorsements" were presented was left up to a
group of users, several of whom have little interest in the good of the
project and are primarily active in stirring up trouble, as a review of
their contributions will show.
This would be a good time to review the process and establish some
better ground rules for future elections. I like the practice of
collecting short candidate statements in one place, leaving them the
freedom to post longer statements and have discussions with the
community in their own user space. If we continue to have endorsements,
I think a similar principle can apply there. Let people who want to make
public endorsements use their own user pages for that purpose, and
perhaps collect a list of links to those pages. Anything more than that
becomes an unreadable VfD-style page and bogs down in the attacks that
get flung back and forth. Just because some people want the opportunity
to air their grudges with particular candidates does not entitle them to
maximum exposure of their grievances.
--Michael Snow