From: Ken Causey
Hmm. I'm confused. Why are you picking people to ask questions? Actually I'm not sure if you are referring to who is 'asking a question' or who is 'answering a question'. In the first case it seems to me its open to anyone in the community. At the time you edit the questions it would not bother me if you removed any asked by someone who can't even vote (hopefully that wouldn't come up of course), but otherwise anyone should be able to ask. In the second case, every nominee should be asked to answer every question. Whether they choose to skip one or more is up to each individual nominee, but they should all have the opportunity to answer each and every question. Or perhaps am I misunderstanding?
What happened last year is that I tried to solicit questions from the community. The response was dismal. I tried to get people to discuss on squeak-dev, no response. So finally I made up the questions myself but the candidates objected to that. My thought was that if we are going to do this then we need to have questions and start the ball rolling. If we put it out to the community we will get nothing. If I make up questions there will be complaints. So I was offering as a solution choosing a number of very prominent members of the community and asking them personally to submit questions to the candidates. This is like the debate (questions asked by qualified individuals) but without the time problem (being able to organize a time on IRC for a global community). I'm ok with anyone asking questions and having all the candidates answer them, I'm just concerned that we will get no response to requests for questions.
Ron