----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Mehnle" <bulk(_at_)mehnle(_dot_)net>
To: <spf-discuss(_at_)v2(_dot_)listbox(_dot_)com>
Sent: Saturday, December 18, 2004 9:47 PM
Subject: RE: [spf-discuss] Open council and project issues
John Pinkerton wrote:
We already have an "electoral register" It's what was used for the
council elections and is all the people on the mail-lists. We can
bring that up to date as necessary.
Agreed. But by what rules?
Heh - that's the rub, isn't it? I'd suggest that one of the conditions of
eligibility to vote would be something to do with a minimum number of posts
to the lists in a given time, plus something about never having been
moderated ;-)
It's a fairly simple matter for a small group of people to come up with a
set of rules that would include all the "active" SPF people.
I agree, there should be some rules that it should follow when
evaluating candidates and their qualifications. But I also think it
should have fairly strong powers to be able to protect spf community
from takeover and that requires for example being able to not accept
candidate who is not active in SPF Community or has been active only
for very short time.
In cases like this it's not unusual for a candidate to need a minimum
of 5 or so nominations for him/her to be considered. I debated doing
that with the council elections, but it wasn't needed in the end.
I think that would even have been harmful because our community is too
small for that. How many are subscribed to the mailing lists?
About 5,000.
How many
of those have actively taken part in discussions?
dunno exactly, but I'd guess about 150 - 200
How many have actually
voted?
Ermm - I think it was something like 120?
A lot of the 15 candidates might not have received their 5 nominations, so
we could have ended up with having to elect 5 council members from 6 or 7
candidates.
yea - maybe 5 is a bit many - but you understand the principle.
Bear in mind that just because you and a few others want things to go a
certain way doesn't mean that you're representing the views of the
majority. Democracy is a dangerous game - and there really are no
rules that will make things go the way *everyone* wants.
True.
The most successful governments are usually run by benign dictators, and the
most unsuccessful ones by authoritarian committees. Somewhere in the middle
lies democracy, but we don't need to study the world's messy political
systems to come up with a simple scheme for SPF.
Nothing will be perfect, but there were no serious objections to the methods
I used last time - so, what's the problem with repeating that scheme ?
Slainte,
JohnP.
johnp(_at_)idimo(_dot_)com
ICQ 313355492