Having not received a ballot for this years elections I went into my spam folder to see if it had been caught there. Instead I found a renewal notification for my foundation membership. The policy for members to renew their membership every two years is not a bad one but I was just informed that I can not be renewed until after the elections and as such can not cast any vote in this cycle. That is a bad policy. For someone who is in good standing with the Foundation, having worked on its behalf and even have been a board member myself, I feel I have a right to vote in this election.
The policy to not allow renewal at the ballot box has in effect disenfranchised me. Most bodies of democracy I know allow registering at the ballot box for those who have a record of having been previously registered and can prove they are who they say they are. We aren’t talking about someone voting who has not participated in a vote before and would require excessive vetting before gaining that right.
What really gets me steamed about the situation is that due to being caught in a spam filter the only other way I could know that I was removed from the Foundation’s member list was to realize that I never received a voting ballot in which case I am not even give a chance to re-register before voting cuts it off.
UPDATE: I have been notified by the membership committee that many people failed to re-register and are unable to vote this cycle. If this isn’t a sign of a broken system then people are ignoring the issue. I could see if this was an isolated incident but since there is a small number of people who are eligible to vote I wonder what the ratio is of people who were denied a vote due to this procedural issue. I bet it is statistically significant. How can a vote be legitimate when a significant portion of the community is denied their vote? It is grounds for a challenge during the ratification stage.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]
This happened to me last election.
Comment by jorge — June 2, 2011 @ 7:28 pm
Exactly the same thing happened to me, which is horribly frustrating
Comment by RubenV — June 2, 2011 @ 7:49 pm
Same thing here, count on me if you want to take further action.
Comment by Alberto Ruiz — June 2, 2011 @ 8:35 pm
The issue seems to be that your mail setup is broken.
Comment by foo — June 2, 2011 @ 9:28 pm
Bollocks.
As I value fairness quite a lot I find some offense in your statement. Let me say that I find it quite unfair to cause us work at this busy stage where you probably got an email once your membership was about to expire, once the elections were about to be announced and *even a personal email reminding you* that you have to renew in order to vote. Let alone all the discussions on the candidates, ramblings on IRC or even a blog post by Og. So via what other ways do you want us to inform you about your membership? Are you saying that you don’t read foundation-announce but at the same time care about the foundation?
So I’d say we have done pretty much (even too much babysitting for my taste). I’m not claiming that our system is perfect. I know it’s not. But we took even more actions that we did last year. Anyway, you are welcome to suggest improvements and help making them happen though.
As for the electorate: We never had more people voting as we have this year. So 345 people managed to be able to vote. You are a tiny minority that failed to either care about it enough or read your mail. It’s also much less people than the previous years that forgot to renew in time. So this year worked extremely well.
Sorry that it doesn’t work for you this year. Let’s work on it to make it work for you next year.
Cheers,
Tobi
Comment by Muelli — June 2, 2011 @ 9:52 pm
I just barely squeaked my renewal in (thanks to averi’s help it happened in time for elections.)
Maybe it would be better to send out renewal emails a little bit further ahead in time of the election?
I mean, the email was great, it was easy to click on the link, the form that loaded was great and worked fine, and the review of my renewal was more than timely – but I think we’re all busy folks, and I don’t think the renewal notice sat in my inbox over a week.
I mean, we’re provided from May 26 – June 12 to vote (2.5 weeks) to vote. I received my ‘about to expire’ notice on May 18 – that’s at best a week’s time to renew. Maybe there should be an equal amount of time for both?
It’s not just a rush for the many busy foundation members to renew, but isn’t that a big burden on the foundation membership committee to process all those renewals within such a short period of time?
Comment by Máirín Duffy — June 2, 2011 @ 10:44 pm
Muelli,
You sound like one of those people that annoyingly believe the purpose of rules and policies are an end unto themselves; that hoops exist as some kind of test to prove people out. You ignore that the whole purpose of such policies are to help create and manage a model that reflects as accurately as possible an ever changing group of actual contributors and stakeholders.
No abstraction will ever be perfect, but it shows your out-of-wack priorities when you write the words “too much babysitting”. As if there could ever be “too much” accuracy in your model.
At the end of the day your procedures arguably failed to include everyone who should have been included. How about addressing that, instead of pontificating about how wonderful are your hoops, and the people who jumped through them.
Comment by Jonathan Haskins — June 2, 2011 @ 11:38 pm
Mullie,
I’ll repost my email here -
So you want to make this personal? I have only been commenting on the policy but now you are offended? I’m sorry but there is a major
problem here. I’m not the only one who has had this issue over the years. It seems that it is known that foundation e-mails tend to go
to spam filters as evidenced by the election board’s advice that you look in your spam folder. I was on the board for a year and a half
and these issues were never brought up to the board. These are technical issues that can be addressed and fixed. They are things
that once fixed would constitute much less work on your part.
I’m sorry if your feelings are more paramount then the proper running of an election. I will be contesting the election if this not addressed. Things I want to know are how many people were denied votes this time around because of delayed registration and who are the people on the membership board and the election board.
Comment by J5 — June 3, 2011 @ 12:06 am
I was indeed wondering why I did not get the ballot and I would not have realized that my membership expired if it wasn’t for your blog post!
Comment by pbor — June 3, 2011 @ 2:56 am
For me foundation notifications also frequently landed in the spam filter. If foundation notifications end in spam filter for many people, it might be that something with that mails or its mail server is broken. Mails don’t frequently get flagged as spam without a reason.
Other than that: J5 has a serious point. The foundation should not permit technical faults limit its board’s legitimisation. Permitting such situation doesn’t fit an organisation putting freedom on its banner.
Comment by Mathias Hasselmann — June 3, 2011 @ 2:59 am
Tobi:
> Let’s work on it to make it work for you next year.
Why not work on making it work for him right now, by allowing him to renew in time to vote? I fail to see what is being gained by punishing him here other than harming your own reputation.
Comment by Chris Cunningham — June 3, 2011 @ 4:01 am
1. Apart our renewal e-mails, it’s actually one of your duties as a Foundation Member to check when you last renewed and when you should send out a renewal form again.
2. This year around 3-4 people didn’t renew in time while we have around 350 members registered, do you still think this is ground for challenging elections?
3. *many* people renewed in time and while I have a @gmail.com account myself I never had a single mail from the GNOME servers getting caught by the spam filters.
4. Election’s setup started around one month ago with our announcement and since that time you never had the time / interest to check the status of your membership? (expired in 2010)
We are not denying anyone to vote, you lost your membership since one year so it won’t be a straight forward renew as you expected.
Comment by Andrea Veri — June 3, 2011 @ 5:50 am
J5: So when did your membership expire exactly? And how many emails have you received about your expiring membership?
Comment by andre klapper — June 3, 2011 @ 7:08 am
@Andrea:
“it won’t be a straight forward renew as you expected.” is actually contradicting http://foundation.gnome.org/membership/ which explicitly states that
“Renewal applications and applications from previous members who did not renew are automatically accepted.”
If that is not true any longer (and it should be true), it certainly needs to be wider publicized.
Per the charter of the foundation, membership in the GNOME foundation should be infinite. As I understand it, the only reason why we are doing all this fuss about renewal is to get rid of people who don’t want to be members anymore (and maybe people who died). And if this is really the only reason why we are making people unhappy, then we seriously need to reconsider this whole process of renewal.
Fwiw, IMO an ok UI for membership renewal would be an email that said “It is usually enough to reply to this email to renew your membership.” the same way mailman makes you inish a mailing list (un)subscription.
Comment by Benjamin Otte — June 3, 2011 @ 7:31 am
http://www.gnome.org/friends leads to nothing
Comment by Juan — June 3, 2011 @ 8:11 am
@Juan: A lot was changed with the 3.0 website re-design. Try:
http://www-old.gnome.org/friends/
Comment by Jeff Schroeder — June 3, 2011 @ 8:29 am
Juan: Add a / at the end of the URL.
Comment by andre klapper — June 3, 2011 @ 8:29 am
@andre,
Apparently I have not been a member for 8 months now, during the time I organized the Boston Summit and did other work for GNOME. Admittedly a long time but I didn’t receive a single e-mail due to spam filters which was an admitted issue by the election committee by evidence of them asking people to look in their spam folders for ballots. Also as the only time a Foundation membership is actually pertinent is during elections the 8 month is actually reasonable. I voted in the last elections and the lack of any e-mail reminders or practical reminders such as other less important ballots gave me no pause to think I may have to renew.
@everyone
Let’s keep this civil and not place blame on the people volunteering for the Foundation on the membership or election committee. It is simply a bad policy they are following. And, while they may be stubborn and feel besieged by my vocalness in this matter, they have to come to the conclusion eventually that something needs to be fixed.
If not then I will be deeply disappointed in an entity I had put much work and faith in.
Comment by J5 — June 3, 2011 @ 8:59 am
@Benjamin,
asking applicants to complete a form is the only thing we require to contributors, like you, that have been active during the past years to the Foundation. But how should we behave with a contributor that stopped contributing 10 years ago and now wants to renew his membership? It looks silly to me to renew his membership right away, there must be a check to ensure that our Foundation is made by people that really care about GNOME and contribute to it not just with words but with real facts. I hope you’ve understood this point.
Comment by Andrea Veri — June 3, 2011 @ 9:16 am
@J5
Why didn’t you ping me privately? I am the first one here that will work on improving how things are going, (looks to me like a technical problem than a policy one) and having you mailing me directly wouldn’t have caused so many troubles and pain.
Our technical resources are old and there is a lot of coding work to take care of, so if you or anyone else is up for some coding to renew our forms / scripts, we will definitely welcome him. What you did is just complaining just for the sake of doing so, this will lead us no where.
Comment by Andrea Veri — June 3, 2011 @ 9:22 am
@Andrea,
I complained because time is of the essence. I’m happy to lend coding to the long term issue if the short term issue is fixed. And, I did go through the process before writing the blog post.
Comment by J5 — June 3, 2011 @ 9:47 am
@John
I never received any single mail from you privately neither via IRC, but anyway we’re now voting on how to move forward.
Comment by Andrea Veri — June 3, 2011 @ 10:37 am
@Andrea
No, if you want to renew your membership after 25 years without having done anything with GNOME in that time, it should be granted to you immediately without asking questions.
I think even revoking membership is already quite rude behavior. “No, your contributions aren’t worth it anymore. Go do something new so we consider you worthy again.”
Comment by Benjamin Otte — June 3, 2011 @ 3:40 pm