[Elections] Re: Checking in / next steps

[Brent Vukmer]

Daniel just pointed out that I sent two emails to addressed only to
him today, that were mean for the whole Election Team.  Sigh.  I've
been in too much of a hurry to catch up, and I'm making stupid
mistakes.  I apologize for the confusion.  Here's what I sent earlier
in the day, just for the record.
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Daniel - you make a lot of good points.  I'm fine with having an
interim period after the current board steps down.  However, I think
we should spend that time identifying candidates, talking with them,
helping them get the message out to their constituencies (the various
groups in the "Squeak Commons"), etc.

My motivation for having an election close to 2/16/06 (for some value
of "close") is to avoid a long lag while we work on a constitution,
trust metric, voting system, etc.  I think a long lag would be bad for
a community that's already fairly sluggish about self-governance.

So, the tasks I see ahead of us for the next few months are:
- Recruiting folks from various groups who can help the election team
find candidates in those groups
- Getting the word out on squeak-dev, squeak-ja, squeakland, etc.
about the elections
- Publishing a public list of candidates with an explanation of why
each one is a candidate
- Building a dirt-simple voting app
- Running the election

Longer-term, I definitely think that we need to define at least a tiny
constitution that describes how the board works, what its duties are,
how elections work.  I also believe that we need to develop a good
mechanism for becoming a voter; I've appreciated the team's discussion
on this.

However I'm firmly convinced after reading the team's discussion that
we won't be done with a constitution or a voting process in a few
months.  And why should we?  Why not spend the rest of this year
working on it, after the election?

Meantime, I think we need to be meeting and greeting candidates.  I
liked Lex's list of folks he's worked with.  Lex, would you mind
contacting some of those folks and ask them whether they'd stand as
candidates, or have candidates they'd like to suggest?