Open Stack

Mark McLoughlin wrote:
>   - with such a large electorate, getting a majority of a 25+% voter 
>     turnout to vote for an election system change is going to require a 
>     lot of awareness raising. I'm trying to imagine a massive "our
>     election system is broken, it's critical you turn out to fix it" 
>     being a positive thing. I'm also concious that if we did hold a 
>     vote to move to STV and it was rejected, that could be the end of 
>     the matter forever.

Frankly, if getting a 25+% voter turnout is seen as an impossible task,
that means the membership is fundamentally broken. And I think it is,
due to the low bar of entry and lack of membership expiration.

A precondition to any rule that defines a minimum membership turnout is
to keep the membership sane and active. If we keep members forever, then
we are bound to have stale entries in that database and getting 25% (or
even 5%) turnout will one day just be impossible.

So the first step in fixing this mess is to sanitize the membership. I
would send out emails to existing members and give them two weeks to
confirm they are still active and would like to participate to the
upcoming elections. Send a reminder after one week, then remove all
entries that did not click the right button. It's no big deal anyway,
they can re-add themselves very easily if they want.

In parallel, I would go through the list and remove obvious duplicates
entries. Looking at the members directory, there are a LOT of them, and
each of them makes that 25% target less likely.

Then we should not fear changing the rules, because that 25% target
would actually work the way it was intended, not as a rule to block all
future changes.

-- 
Thierry Carrez (ttx)