[GRASS-PSC] Voter question

Wed Oct 30 02:57:43 PDT 2024

Hello Moritz,

Thank you for your message. I still have to write a few lines to the PSC 
with some post-election reflections, but your e-mail prompts me to do it 
now.

First of all I thank everyone for trusting me as CRO once more! Always a 
pleasure for me to contribute and give back to the GRASS community.

1) I believe the elections run fairly smoothly. I did not experience any 
major disruption or severe problems with the system or the organization.

2) The best part is that we had a list of voters right at the start, 
which Vero had compiled in good time using very clear criteria for who 
was eligible.

3) The not so nice part is that participation was lower than some of us 
expected. A possible way to address this is, as Moritz writes, could be 
by removing the reflection week and instead having a longer election 
period. This would give people more time to vote in the midst of life 
and work.

4) As expected, some (5) voter emails did not work. Also, 2 voters were 
surprised (annoyed perhaps?) by being asked to vote. Then add one or two 
special cases. These seem like negligible numbers, but 7 or 8 among 153, 
is already about 5%. We are dealing with small numbers, a few missing 
here and there have a relatively large effect.

5) For the next election we need to remove addresses of those who do not 
wish to participate anymore and do something about the invalid 
addresses. I was not able to find in LimeSurvey a way of giving the 
voters a link for that. Perhaps we just need to tell voters to write to 
the CRO.

6) Note to the next CRO: far from everyone reads e-mails. Information 
has to be redundant. Emails sent from LimeSurvey need to contain 
information about opening and closing dates, link to the statements and 
possibly a note at the end telling the voters to ask the CRO directly in 
case they are not interested in voting or getting reminders.

7) I have now a much better grasp of LimeSurvey. I still think is not 
easy to understand how to do things beyond some elementary level. The 
documentation is not bad but is often shallow and seldom goes deeper 
than the obvious. As it is not advisable to test things while running a 
hot election I propose that before next election we run a test to push 
the system, try and break things and test settings. This takes time but 
may be worth the lessons.

Den 2024-10-30 kl. 09:22, skrev Moritz Lennert:
> Hello Hernán,
> 
> First of all, thank you for all the work you've done for this election ! 
> I think you've done more than enough to remind people to vote. So it's 
> on all of us who didn't, not on you. And thank you to all you accepted 
> to stand for election !
> 
> I can only speak for myself, and that's probably a special perspective, 
> as I've been quite far from GRASS GIS in the last years, due to changes 
> in my professional life.
> 
> Nevertheless, I continue to follow discussions and was ready to vote, 
> but the voting period fell into a very bad week for me, and I when I was 
> in front of the computer I only focused on work, and didn't even go into 
> my GRASS GIS email folders. I actually was ready to vote when we got the 
> candidates' statements, and then kind of lost track through the no- 
> action period to then be, as explained, less receptive when the voting 
> actually started.
> 
> Again, this is very personal, and I might be the only one, but why did 
> we need a no-action period ? Why not just start voting once all 
> candidate statements are in, and make the voting period a bit longer ? 
> That doesn't excuse my non-voting, but it might get you a few more votes 
> in.
> 
> Also, in some European countries, the voting week was a week of school 
> vacation and so some people might have been traveling with family, but 
> that's probably minor.
> 
> Finally, and that might probably explain a bit more: IIUC from the wiki 
> page, criteria for being eligible to vote are not time-based, i.e. 
> anyone who ever committed a PR or translated something is eligble, even 
> if that happened years ago. I have the feeling that some of the names on 
> the list are people that haven't been active in quite some time, so 
> maybe part of the non-participation is due just to people feeling too 
> far from the project. How would that list change if you only took those 
> who were active in the last, say, three years ?
> 
> Anyhow, congratulations to the new PSC members and thanks again, Hernán, 
> for your great work !
> 
> Moritz
> 
> 
> On 28/10/24 20:59, Chief Return Officer (CRO) - GRASS GIS election 2024 
> via grass-psc wrote:
>> Michael,
>>
>> I do not understand that part either. Several other elections in 
>> LimeSurvey seem to have that "feature", with comparatively many 
>> incomplete responses. I had explicitly blocked partial responses: 
>> voters had to choose 4 candidates. Yet it happened. I have no 
>> explanation for how. May be it has to do with the system itself.
>>
>> But it would be a mistake for us to focus on this aspect of the issue, 
>> when the real problem seems to me why so few people felt compelled to 
>> vote. Somehow the engagement wasn't there as it was in 2020 (my 
>> impression).
>>
>> I sent two reminders in total via LimeSurvey: one on Thursday and 
>> another on Sunday. Only 27 people voted between the opening first 
>> reminder on Thursday. Between then and Sunday, when I sent the second 
>> reminder, only 21 more had voted. After the second reminder and until 
>> the closing only 11 more voted. On Friday I also sent a message 
>> through the lists. Yet few actively voted. Why? I do not know. I 
>> insisted enough I believe. Then there is also a limit on how many 
>> reminders you can push via email before wearing people's patience out.
>>
>> Hernán
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Den 2024-10-28 kl. 18:06, skrev Michael Barton:
>>> While this is a low number, it is better than it seemed from the vote 
>>> totals at 40%. Of the remaining 60%, I don't quite understand how 23 
>>> incomplete ballots resulted in 3 votes but perhaps I misunderstood 
>>> your point.
>>>
>>> Michael
>>> _____________________________
>>>
>>> C. Michael Barton
>>> Associate Director, School of Complex Adaptive Systems (https:// 
>>> scas.asu.edu <https://scas.asu.edu/>)
>>> Professor, School of Human Evolution & Social Change (https:// 
>>> shesc.asu.edu <https://shesc.asu.edu>)
>>> Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity (https:// 
>>> complexity.asu.edu <https://complexity.asu.edu>)
>>> Arizona State University
>>> Tempe, AZ 85287-2701
>>> USA
>>>
>>> Executive Director, Open Modeling Foundation (https:// 
>>> openmodelingfoundation.github.io <https:// 
>>> openmodelingfoundation.github.io/>)
>>> Director, Network for Computational Modeling in Social & Ecological 
>>> Sciences (https://comses.net <https://comses.net>)
>>>
>>> personal website: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton <http:// 
>>> www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Oct 28, 2024, at 7:35 AM, Chief Return Officer (CRO) - GRASS GIS 
>>>> election 2024 <variablestarlight at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Michael
>>>>
>>>> See the summary in the elction Wiki. I see no anomaly, but I share 
>>>> the impression that the participation was lower this time than in 2020.
>>>>
>>>>   * name and e-mail address for 153 eligible voters were loaded
>>>>   * 5 e-mail addresses were invalid
>>>>   * 2 voters explicitly declined to participate
>>>>   * 59 registered voters submitted complete responses (i.e. chose 4
>>>>     candidates out of 10)
>>>>   * 87 registered voters either did not participate or submitted empty
>>>>     or partial responses
>>>>       o of these, 23 partial or incomplete votes were registered,
>>>>         resulting in 3 definite votes for 3 different candidates
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/PSC_Election_2024#Details
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Den 2024-10-28 kl. 15:29, skrev Michael Barton:
>>>>> Thanks for all your work in managing the PSC election Hernán.
>>>>>
>>>>> Can you tell me how many total people were eligible to vote and how 
>>>>> many of them voted? The totals published seem like a very small 
>>>>> number.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks
>>>>>
>>>>> Michael Barton
>>>>> School of Human Evolution &Social Change
>>>>> School of Complex Adaptive System Science
>>>>> Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
>>>>> Arizona State University
>>>>>
>>>>> ...Sent from my iPad
>>>>
>>>> -- 
>>>> Hernán De Angelis
>>>>
>>>> Chief Return Officer (CRO)
>>>> GRASS GIS election 2024
>>>
>>
> 

-- 
Hernán De Angelis

Chief Return Officer (CRO)
GRASS GIS election 2024