[Board] Feedback from the CRO about the Board Elections

[Jorge Sanz]

Hi Board,

I've collected some thoughts about the elections process on a wiki page for
reference but also sending here for discussion if any.

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Elections_2016_CRO_feedback

This was my last remaining item as CRO for this year but let me know if I
can help on anything else.

All the best
Jorge


=== Contacting 300 people ===

The main issue has been being able to reach our members. We have a database
of charter members with name, country, e-mail and start and end dates for
the membership. This database is maintained manually by the OSGeo
secretary. When the voting is set up on the electronic system (LimeSurvey)
a CSV export of that table is uploaded to be used to send mails and
reminders.

On the other hand we have our charter members addresses stored more or less
systematically on other places: Charter Members mailing list, wiki users
database and the OSGeo LDAP.

The main issue is having a maintained database to contact users. Many of
them provide work addresses that get obsolete often. They maybe update the
Wiki or LDAP database but never contact the secretary (nobody told them to
do so) and really seldom they update their address on the mailing list.

How we fix this problem? I think a way to do so would be to use OSGeo LDAP,
so we remove e-mails from the charter members table and use LDAP ids so
when elections arrive we just get the e-mails from there and join with that
table to get the results. I have no idea how hard is to export LDAP records
but anything we can do to reduce redundancy on this list is worth.

=== Voting system using CRO alias ===

The Voting system is using a mail sender to distribute e-mails, using the
CRO OSGeo alias (cro at osgeo.org) as a sender. This is probably causing some
issues as being identifiied as a spam behavior. This should be fixed if the
voting system (hosted at geo-spatial.org server) can use it's own mail
address, something like osgeo_elections at geo-spatial.org that would look
legit for more e-mail services.

=== Voting schedule ===

We should plan ahead the campaign time that was improvised so candidates
have more time to prepare their manifestos. Also I think we should increase
to two weeks the voting period to allow more members to get time. This has
improved over other years where we had the voting in northen hemisphere
summer season.

So the calendar for Board elections would be two weeks for nominations, a
week for campaigning and two for voting.

=== Raising concerns ===

One charter member contacted me to ask about advice on how to raise
concerns on a candidate. The issue was the fear that raising a direct
concern on a public list would lead to an ad-hominem discussion, fading the
concern itself. It's a bit worrying for me that this is an issue in the
sense that we are seen as a community that can't accept non positive
feedback.

=== Voting mechanics ===

Another charter member contacted me complaining about not being able to
cast less votes than open seats. Other years we've allowed several votes to
be casted to the same candidate. Another simpler solution is just allowing
to vote from zero to the number of open seats.


-- 
Jorge Sanz
http://www.osgeo.org
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanz
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