[Foundation-l] Voting requirements for community selected seats (Was: unable to vote)

Tue Jun 3 19:18:41 UTC 2008

Maybe it is better to take a small step back.

First of all let me make a small remark: we better have this
discussion more extensively after the elections.

OK, but I can't hold myself, so here we go anyway :P. What are the
seats about? The seats are *community selected seats*, but also to
some extent community representative seats (at least they are
traditionally, even though not every board member appears to agree
with that currently). So the question we should *actually* ask
ourselves is "what is the community, and who belongs to it?". The rest
will follow from that. Because if you are not a member of the
community, you can not vote, obviously, how harsh this might sound.
Please note that I only want to discuss the basics, and do not to
intend to attack anyone personally, even though this might sound as
such.

So, some subquestions are:
* Which communities do we count as part of the overlapping major
community? Does the MediaWiki developers community count?
* Is anyone maybe even excluded automatically from the community? Even
I personally would say no, this could include paid staff members (if
we are talking about the volunteer community), current officials,
people who committed certain things, such as getting blocked
infinitely on any wiki and candidates.
* When do we count someone "in the community"? With a specific number
of edits? With a specific drive?
* Is community membership for life?

And there will probably be more subquestions like this. Please let's
focus on those, and not on individual cases.

Best regards,

Lodewijk

2008/6/3 Ray Saintonge <saintonge op telus.net>:
> Delphine Ménard wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 2, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>>
>>> For developers/sysadmins/meta-pedians  you could simply create an
>>> additional rule as was done for staff. I don't think many people would
>>> object to a rule making that that says "If you have SVN checkin to the
>>> mediawiki ,SVN or  if you have elevated access to the foundation
>>> servers, or if you've made 400 posts to the foundation's lists, or if
>>> you've billed more than 400 hours to the WMF,  you can vote".
>>>
>> How about keeping some kind of edit count (ie. minimum X edits
>> altogether but no time limit) and then having an opt-in option?
>>
> The two types of edit count serve two different functions, and if there
> are other ways of answering those questions that's fine.  The long term
> edit count expresses some degree of commitment rather than drive-by
> activity.  The 600 figure seems somewhat arbitrary, but so would a
> larger or smaller figure. The short term figure answers the question,
> "Are you still alive?"  Even one edit during the specified time might be
> enough for this, as could evidence of other useful activity within that
> same time.
>> In short, in order to have the right to vote, you must express your
>> interest in voting *before* the election. That is, for example, a
>> month before the candidates are asked to submit their platforms, you
>> have a projects-wide announcement that calls for a voting pool. "If
>> you're interested, please enroll today in the voting lists".
> I don't think that will work.  However many such announcements you make
> there will always be a large number complaining that they were never
> notified that an election was coming.  You can put deadlines on
> candidate submissions since anyone who isn't clueful enough to figure
> that out probably shouldn't be a candidate in the first place.  Voters
> are a different matter.
>
> Ec
>
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