On 2012-02-01 00:49:54 (+0100), Philipp Thomas
On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:30:18 +0100, Pascal Bleser
wrote:
Um, sorry: obligatory voting is not undemocratic. Both have pros and cons, and some believe that forcing people to vote is more democratic because democracy is not just rights, but also obligations.
And if you make voting mandatory there are so many ways to make a vote invalid. So what do you gain? The moment opensuse makes voting
There wouldn't be any possibility of making the vote invalid with the simple rules that we have (as opposed to the rather complex mechanics most countries have), but with obligatory voting we would obviously have to have an option for "none of the above". What one would gain is the differenciation between - I don't want to vote, for whatever reasons, and - I don't like the options If we have 100 members and 10 say "I don't want to vote", then, IMHO, we can simply ignore those 10 when it comes to computing the relevance of the election (provided there is a "non of the above" that would give anyone the possibility to say: I don't like any of the options). What we don't have in the election process is a way for someone to say "I don't want a board in the first place". If that is the case, I'd love to hear and discuss why, and maybe clarify a few things.
mandatory I'm out out, even if there would be something like a non-voting membership.
I never said that I wanted the voting to be obligatory, I was merely disagreeing with Nelson that "optional voting" was the only democratic way. I'm a bit surprised by the very harsh reactions from some regarding voting in the first place. What is so bad with voting to decide who are your representatives on the board ? Is it philisophical or out of principle because of an analogy with the politics in your country ? Is it because you don't want to be "tracked" ? Is it because you don't have any trust in the board and/or believe it's useless (or even a bad thing) ? Because you are allergic to "power" and believe that the board is in any way a position of "power" ? (it definitely isn't in my book, it's a position of service to the community) Because you don't like some or all of the people who have been (and are) on the board so far ? Because the board hasn't been very active, at least in a visible manner, in the past ? Is it because you don't care about the non technical aspects of the community/project ? (I'm not criticizing! :), just wondering what the reasons could be, and I'm probably missing more obvious ones :)) Would there be any mechanism where you would - pick some option on a form - and reflect your opinion that would be acceptable ? (apparently not, but maybe we're missing a simpler way to handle this because most of us don't know the reasons for not wanting to vote at all) cheers -- -o) Pascal Bleser /\\ http://opensuse.org -- we haz green _\_v http://fosdem.org -- we haz conf