[Elections] Now it is febrary

[Peter Crowther]

> From: [...] Brent Vukmer
> 2/10 - 2/13 -> Folks can sign up for SqP / seek certification as
apprentice; stakeholders can build list of voters 
> 2/14 -> List of voters is created per Peter's proposal, CIVS election
is created
> 2/15 -> voting period starts
> 2/16 -> Voting period ends
> I know this doesn't give folks a ton of time.  Does this sound doable?


Honestly?

No.  In my opinion, it's now too late to run to the original timescale,
but an extra week would probably [barely] suffice.

If we're going for as wide an audience as possible, we need to catch
them.  Many don't read the mailing list on a daily basis; some don't
have Net access on a daily basis.  Assuming w're trying to address some
of the original criticisms about inclusion, we need much more time for
people to sign up; we need some more time to obtain current mailing list
membership from other list admins (assuming that they won't all respond
in a few hours); and we need to allow the polls to be open for longer.

I'd add at least three days to the sign-up period, during which we
*must* also get the other list admins ready to send us membership
details; at least one day to the interim time where some poor sod has to
merge all this stuff together (and go through all the headaches of doing
that for the first time); and as much time as we can spare (up to a
week) to the voting period itself - although that could be shorter if we
do a good awareness-raising exercise on all the related lists in the
meantime, such that we can be reasonably sure that 99%+ of our potential
audience has at least seen the message.

All just my opinions.  I'd propose the following alternative:

2/10-end 2/17 UTC sign up and awareness raising
2/18-end 2/19 UTC interim
2/20-end 2/23 UTC vote (this extends the original proposal by exactly a
week)

Note the timezone specification.

Thoughts?

		- Peter