Hello everyone,
First of all congratulations to all candidates, those who were elected
and also those who were not. It was a honor and a pleasure for me to
serve the GRASS GIS community as CRO. I got a lot of help from all the
more experienced members, specially Markus and Moritz, but also from
Nikos, the previous CRO. Thanks to you all.
In brief, these are my thoughts and lessons for the next election:
- setting up and running an election like this takes time and
dedication, best to start early.
- for the next election a new, better and more tidy registry needs to be
created, only one entry per person with only one valid e-mail address
- the LimeSurvey system hosted at OSGEO is seemingly powerful but not
very intuitive, it takes time to sort out the settings and possibilities
- a discussion is needed to reach consensus on the voting method and
procedures preferred by the community
Detailed thoughts below for those who may want to read more.
Best
Hernán
Detailed thoughts
My impression is that most things went pretty smooth overall. Setting up
and running an election like this takes time and some dedication. It is
best to start early in the processs. The fact that we started the
elections partly during the holiday season was beneficial at least for
me, because it is a time when I can have more time to do things outside
normal work.
The most pressing issue we had is that of the voters registry. We
started with six lists containing at least partly the same people, often
with different spellings, aliases and e-mail addresses. I spent a lot
more time that I had expected matching, sorting and choosing, and
eliminating duplicates (and even triplicates or more), from these lists.
This was often done "in the dark", as I had no clue which was the valid
e-mail for a certain person, for example, or that a person is known to
use two or more aliases. In spite of my efforts some people got more
than one invitation to vote. I constantly monitored the election during
the voting phase to ensure that no one voted twice. To my knowledge
no-one did.
The LimeSurvey software is powerful but not very user friendly (at least
to this user). It took some time and effort to understand the logic
behind it. It is possible and easy to make mistakes that will delete
things. One has to proceed with extreme care. In spite of my efforts
some setting escaped my attention and on the opening day the first
voters reported that they could not vote. Luckily, I managed to fix that
quite soon on that same morning. After finishing the voting phase I
wrote to Jorge to ask for suggestions as to how best allow for audits
and archival as openly as transparently as possible.
I did not get major complaints from people. Perhaps the most important
question is how the survey is conducted. Nikos and another person raised
the issue of why people had to choose 9 members and why they couldn't
vote for one or two, for example. I thought that asking voters to chose
9 members would be a better option than letting them pick any number.
The reason is the following: the PSC will have 9 members, to be chosen
from 13 candidates, to be voted by about 250 registered voters. If we
allow voters to pick any number of members up to 9 there would be a
substantial chance that some candidates may get extremely few votes,
this is mainly because the number of voters is relatively small (and in
fact, only 98 voted) and this can make the distribution of votes very
skewed. This raises a potential problem of representativity for some of
the least voted candidates. Thus I decided it would be better with a
"pick your nine member PSC" model. Not saying that this is perfect but I
deemed it to be a better solution.
Lastly, one person asked why he was getting the reminders, as it has
been many years since he has been associated with the GRASS GIS project.
This is just one case, but perhaps raises questions about how the list
of voters is populated.
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