TOC Community Members Elections - Brainstorm & feedback

[antoviaque (Xavier Antoviaque (OpenCraft) - opencraft.com/help)]

@sambapete

I’ve started “spreading the word” about the election. I started with our internal team at EDUlib at Université de Montréal, Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales de Montréal and Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal. I’ve asked that they spread the word in their own internal groups too.

Thank you @sambapete ! That’s great, it will help to reach more of the eligible voters.

And thanks for passing on the questions, too. It’s useful to know what’s not clear, and get a chance to clarify it.

One of the question I got back from two of our instructors, technically the people helping the instructors build the courses, is that they do not know for whom to vote. I guess people want to know who are the candidates and what are their electoral platform before deciding to register to vote and voting.

I agree, in these types of elections when we are not very actively involved in the project, it’s hard to tell who to vote for, as we don’t know them. Which is why there is a series of questions in the candidature application template about what the candidates would do – their concrete projects and priorities. This way the choice can be focusing more on comparing the proposals of the different candidates, and evaluate what’s important to improve Open edX, from their perspective as instructors – either in the project, or in the software/UX.

Also, @Ali is planning to prepare a dedicated page/site which will provide a recap of the main information about the candidates and will allow to compare between the different projects/programs. See the current plans & discussions about that page.

There also seems to be confusion about who can vote for who. For example, they wanted to vote for me, but unfortunately, I am not a candidate and they would not be able to vote for me since I would be in the “operators & core community representative” category if I chose to run. And this is a restricted vote by core contributors and maintainers.

If you were to declare yourself as a candidate (which I encourage you to do! it’s good for the democratic process to have more candidates, so don’t be shy ), all the eligible voters would be able to vote for you – in other words, the candidates are all the same, regardless of the group of voters you belong to. So if your colleagues qualify for the instructors voters category, they would be able to vote for you.

The only thing is to make sure to fill the voter registration form, and be able to provide the elements listed in the form to confirm their eligibility.