[Linux-aus] AGM Announcement

[Anthony Towns]

On Sun, Oct 24, 2004 at 08:52:16AM +1000, Pia Smith wrote:
> The LA committee have set out the dates and a rough procedure:
> 	Dec 8th - Nominations open for the seven positions 

> 	Jan 6th - All committee reports are posted online, IRC channel opened
> for 48 hours, questions answered by committee, logged and put up with
> the reports.

Any chance the Jan 6th/7th stuff could be separated out slightly more;
so that there's time to read the committee reports before the chance to
raise any questions is over? Would committee reports coming out sometime
between Dec 25th and Jan 2nd, be too much to ask?

> 	Jan 7th - Nominations close at midnight.
> 	Jan 8th - Voting period starts - completely online, 

Hrm, for its leadership elections, Debian does 3 weeks for nominations,
3 weeks for discussion, 3 weeks for voting. The above is 4 weeks for
nominations, 1 day for discussion, 1 week for voting. For Debian, the
nomination and voting periods are probably way too drawn out, and the
LA ones above are much better. I wonder if a day is really enough for
discussion after nominations have finished though. (Recall that last time,
Michael Davies got nominated for VP on the last day of nominations or
so, and then declined the nomination; the above might mean people would
already have voted for him by the time that was cleared up)

> Considering this is the first time we've run this online, the process is
> open to feedback and suggestions :)

I was thinking of making up a voting system that lets you vote for
things like "I want as many different states represented as possible",
and "I don't want more than one person from OzLabs" and "I'd prefer it
if Stuart were VP, but if he doesn't get that I'd like to vote for him
for President", but the "right" way to do that is kind of complicated
and confusing, and I decided it probably wasn't worth the effort anyway.

So what are the ballots going to look like? They can't be the same as
we have in real-life -- ie, one vote for P, VP, S, T, three names for
ordinary members -- because unlike at LCA itself, you can't decide
"well, if Pia doesn't get to be P, I want to vote for her as VP, but
otherwise I'll vote for Stuart to be VP". Presumably then we want to
have preferences, so that we write out:

	President:
		1. Alice
		2. Bob
		3. Carol
		4. Dave
	Vice-President:
		1. Alice
		2. Carol
		3. Fred
	Treasurer:
		1. Elice
		2. Dave
	Secretary:
		1. Geraldine
	Ordinary Members:
		1. ...
		2. ...

And then just iterate through, eliminating people who've already won
something?

Using the same system we have in federal elections would seem to work
okay. Is that what'll be used?

Do we want votes to be anonymous?
Do we want to have people be able to verify the results of the vote?
Do we want people to be able to directly verify their vote has been 
correctly counted?
Do we want it to be impossible to prove how you've voted to someone
else?

(Debian does all but the last for the leadership election; the last two
are mutually exclusive, I believe)

I guess "Dec 10th, run a test of the voting system software" was
accidently missed from the timeline? :)

Cheers,
aj

-- 
Anthony Towns <aj at humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
Don't assume I speak for anyone but myself. GPG signed mail preferred.

``[S]exual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.''
      -- US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (http://tinyurl.com/3kwod)
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