Raymond Wooninck wrote:
Hi Greg,
On Thursday 20 December 2012 14:53:11 Greg Freemyer wrote:
Also, am I the only one bothered by winners having less than 50%? If so, we can leave it as it is.
What concerns me more is that the number of members voting is going down drastically.
In 2010 we had 41.2% of the members voting In 2011 we had 40.8% of the members voting In 2012 we had 29.2% of the members voting.
This year we lost almost 12% of our voting members. The question is why ?
Because of the invisibility of the board and lack of interest. I think the latter is partially due to the former.
According to c.o.o, we have 534 Community Members. One can ask if these are all active members, but it seems that either the number of our active members is shrinking, members are somehow fed up with the election process or that this year despite the big number of candidates members rather not vote as that it is not possible to cast blank votes (no candidate). So before we change the Election model into something else (and I would appreciate if we could also have a look at voting models that are used in Europe/Asia and not only basing ourselves on American models),
The STV model that was proposed is used in Australia, I think. Besides, to start with, we ought to discuss if anything is actually wrong with the current model. For instance, what is the problem with an elected board member having received less than 50% of the votes? It is not at all unusual for prime ministers in continental Europe to have received less than 50% of the votes. (not an optimal comparison, but still).
we should improve the current election process to make sure that we are giving all possible choices to our members so that we can see an increase in the voting members.
You seem to be thinking that the election process is causing people not to vote? I don't think that is the problem at all. I mean, can anyone really imagine interested members going to the election page, then turning in away in disgust: "I really don't like that election process" ? Also, if the process was really an issue, we would surely have had much more discussion about it before the election. Some Swiss referendums have very low participation, some very high. It depends entirely on the topic. If we want more vote(r)s, we need to present topics that people are interested in. In our case, the "topic" is the Board.
If the majority of the members would cast a blank vote, then this would also be a strong signal that none of the candidates is found suitable.
Well, that is one genuine issue with the process - I've asked about a "None of the above" option for the last two elections. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (5.9°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - free DNS hosting, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org