@jkurik When you have some time, would like to know your thoughts / feedback on the above suggestions! :grinning:

See ticket #19 as well with regards to this upcoming election cycle.

Discussed in 2016-09-13 meeting.

We had brief discussion on this during today's meeting as well. @ankursinha shared some experiences and frustration from his experiences as an election wrangler in the past. We both shared concern over the lack of interest / engagement with questionnaire questions and interviews.

One way we could try to raise awareness for the questionnaires is open the call for questions to be added up to a month before the election. This gives plenty of time for people to review the elections, who is running, and to ask questions they think are important for this election.

Another idea for boosting community participation in the interviews is offering candidates the option to run an AMA on Reddit, where the community can ask them questions and they can answer. It would require up to an hour of a candidate's direct attention, and then they could answer any questions beyond the hour period at their own ability or leisure. I think this would also be a way to bring in some more contributors on the edges into the election process as well.

Thanks for opening this ticket. Improvement in this area is really welcomed :-)

Currently what I see as the biggest issues, from the organizer perspective, is the amount of communication.

At the beginning you need to check what teams would like to have their representatives re-elected. We always go with Council and FESCo, however there might be more teams from time to time. As the list of teams who might join the elections is not defined, the organizer needs to check potential teams using his best guess. This might not be an issue any more as most of the teams (except Council and FESCo) went to a different mechanism to refresh their representatives.

When people nominate them self it is suitable to have one by one communication with every nominee as the nomination is kind of personal decision for every nominee. This might lead to a lot of communication, when the content of the communication is basically the same for all the nominees. Any sort of automation here might help.

Another issue is setup of the Voting Machine which is error-prone. Currently we use wiki for nominee to apply, If this can be somehow integrated into the voting machine it will help to minimize typos in nick/FAS names when the organizer re-types it from wiki to the Voting Machine (yes, we had an issue in the past where people were voting for someone else due to a single character typo in FAS name).

From the community perspective, the main issue is probably interest of the community members in elections. We have a constant problem not only with involvement of people in voting, but we typically have a problem with minimal amount of candidates to nominate and with collecting questions for nominees for interview as well. I am not sure how to move this on as I have realized that there are many people in the community who are interested in contributing code to Fedora however they do not care much about the people in FESCo or Council. So, the proposed way of making elections more visible for social media might help as all the people who are interested in voting are well informed but people not interested in it are not spammed.

Discussed in 2016-10-04 meeting.

We briefly covered this ticket and encouraged other participants to review and add feedback here as necessary (e.g. @ankursinha as a former Election wrangler). Since most of the details of this ticket will focus on the communication aspect of the Election, I'm going to remove this ticket from the meeting agenda for the time being.

One thing that I would like to drive further is how we can work on automating some of the tasks relating to communication to improve community participation in each release cycle. Last year's December election clearly showed the results of our work, and if we are timely and on top of election-related communication, I think we can continue on improving participation numbers.

The topic of election automation is specifically covered in #19. I would like to discuss the idea of developing tools for these tasks further. /me is probably not the best person to consider the technical side for ideas like this.

Hrm. I think the first issue is that elections require the wrangler to use wayy too many tools:

• taskjuggler (or something for the planning)
• wiki for lots of stuff
• email for all communication
• fedmag/fedoracommunity + social media for announcements
• the voting application for the actual voting
• fedocal for dates?

Some of these, obviously, can't be helped. But the main tasks that the election wrangler needs to carry out which require community involvement could maybe put together in ONE tool? Like a dashboard, or just a rewrite/extension of the voting application we currently use? I haven't a clue, but maybe the hubs have something on this or elections in general? Worth a look?

(In fact, I think I remember when @jreznik was the Fedora program manager, we'd had a discussion of how maybe a central tool for the program manager would be nice to have. I think this is the braindump we'd come up with - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ankursinha/Changes_Process_App )

In the last meeting we talk about generate summary charts and tables, but I'm don't sure about what are the best KPI/Indicators for do it.

Actually, I created 3 CSV files (FAmSCo, Council, FESco) with some data (name,fas account, IRC nick, wiki, Interview (yes/no and link), etc) and I added:

• Number of badges
• Number of activities done in the last month, I get this number from the gsoc-stats app

also I wrote a little python script to generate HTML tables from the CSVs, if any have ideas about what indicators add or remove, I will be happy to create tables and (beautiful) charts before the elections ends.

In the last meeting we talk about generate summary charts and tables, but I'm don't sure about what are the best KPI/Indicators for do it.

Number of badges
Number of activities done in the last month, I get this number from the gsoc-stats app

This is critical to decide and understand. Publishing this data will imply that the Project thinks someone should consider the candidates on these dimensions. I am concerned that we not publish data that would prejudice the election process.

That's right, we have to be careful, but it's still real data ... and in my personal case helps me to take my decisions.

I guess a more refined version including more KPI and splitting the activities done by category like community work, development, marketing, etc could be useful when (like this time) we don't have interviews for all the candidates.

I really think that the contributor's path in the community can be used to improve decisions in the elections

Discussed in 2017-01-24 meeting.

In our meeting, we determined that the best way to move forward is to extract smaller, more achievable goals and have them as their own tickets. @cprofitt volunteered to help with this and pull out the key points so we can focus in closer on objectives we can complete. This is due on Tuesday, 31 January 2017.

Issue #102 - https://pagure.io/fedora-commops/issue/102 - consolidates communications issues.

Issue #103 - https://pagure.io/fedora-commops/issue/103 - consolidates improving voter participation.

Discussed in 2017-02-07 meeting.

Even though we broke discussion up in #102 and #103, one thing that didn't really fit in either ticket was the idea about Helios Voting. We can discuss it later, but I wanted to leave this link here for future reference.

The Helios looks quite interesting. Does anyone have a real experience with it ?

@jkurik I think this was brought up by @ankursinha, but I'm not sure if he had used it in the past. Maybe he can clarify if he has any experience with it!

Is it okay to close this ticket since it's contents have been extracted to #102 and #103 ?

@bee2502 : I am fine to close this.

Ticket closed

Closing from earlier discussion. :clapper: