Open Stack

On Wed, 2013-10-09 at 14:23 +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> 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.

Strongly agree.

> 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.

Nice ideas.

> 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.

Yep, it would help a lot.

Thanks,
Mark.