Re: Elections!

Le 10/05/2010 09:28, Simon Riggs a écrit :
> On Mon, 2010-05-10 at 06:59 +0100, Simon Riggs wrote:
>
>> The rules don't prevent manipulation, they just require that
>> manipulation to be planned in advance.
>

Even without talking about manipulations and conspiracy theories, i see
this 4-week rule as a very good thing.

Here's my experience with the PGFR votes that happened last march.
PGFR and PGEU have similar statutes even though they've evolved
separatedly and elections rules a slightly different...

PGFR doesn't have such a rule saying that members must be registred at
least 4 weeks before the elections. Anyone member can vote with no time
restriction. What happened this year is that the Boad election was
scheduled after an Open Source Meeting where PGFR had booth. Some
visitors came to the booth and took their membership to the association,
which is a good thing. And by doing so they got the right to vote to the
elections a few hours later, which is absolutely not a good thing.

That night we had a very important vote about changing the statutes,
based on a proposition that took several days to come up. It was a very
technical and important vote. During the wote, we had 5 or 6 newcomers
voices with absolutely no clue of what was happening. I'm not saying it
changed the final result, but surely it produced a lot of frustration
for everyone. Even the newcomers where somewhat annoyed to take part in
an election without understanding the pro and cons...

These guys never had the chance to take the time, talk to people, read
mails and build their own opinion. If they had only a few days to do so,
everything would have been so much more simpler and we would have
avoided those frustrations.

Anyway what happened in the end is that one of the newcomers asked for
the elections to be remade. His demand seemed legitimate and so we
relaunched a new elections process.

We just achieved this new elections process in PGFR. Overall we lost
something like 6 weeks.

So yes based on that recent experience, i think 4 weeks is a reasonable
time period before any new members can vote. i understand perfectly that
you're not a really "newcomer" in this community :)
That rule is surely very frustrating in your particular case but imho it
prevents us from far more frustrations and bigger difficulties.

--
damien clochard