Fedora Voter Turnout

As I am sure all have seen by now the Fedora Board elections are over and the elected seats have been announced. Congratulations to Tom Callaway, Jesse Keating, Seth Vidal and Jef Spaleta on being elected! I know from following various IRC channels and mailing lists that they will do an excellent job on helping guide Fedora forward.

One of the disappointing things was voter turnout for this election. Of the 4069 people that have signed the CLA, 250 of them voted (information courtesy of Nigel Jone’s blog post). Why is that number so low? Fedora elections, especially board elections, are a great way to help get your say in how the future for Fedora should look.

There is some pretty active discussion happening on the fedora-advisory-board list about voting turn out and why some did vote and why others did not vote. That’s sort of like the choir talking amongst themselves since those of us belonging to the fedora-advisory-board list are probably interested in Fedora politics at that level.

Let’s open this up to a slightly wider forum – the Planet! Yes, the planet is still not the perfect medium as probably the more active Fedora contributors or Fedora interested folks are watching the Planet – but it is a place to start soliciting some additional feedback.

So… if you didn’t vote in the recent Fedora Board elections, why not? Did you forget they were happening? Didn’t like the candidate choice? Or were you satisfied with candidate choice and though any of them would do a fine job? Did you not like the voting method employed this time for the elections? Was there some other reason you didn’t vote? What could be done better to encourage higher voter participation?

Feel free to add to the thread on the fedora-advisory-board list. Or if you don’t want to subscribe to the mailing list to post – feel free to add comments to this blog post and I will collect the comments and forward them on the fedora-advisory-board list.

FUDCon Summaries and Board Elections

Thanks to everyone posting summaries from FUDCon and the Red Hat Summit. As someone that wanted to go but could not, it has been great to read about things on the Planet. Sort of a way to live vicariously through the folks that could go! So please keep it up!

I finally voted today in the Fedora Board elections. For those that have not done so – you still have until 11:59 PM UTC on June 22nd, 2008 to get your vote in. Lots of great people running and it was nice to see some of the new faces running as well. It made for a difficult choice.

Release Party Contest Winner

Following the release of Fedora 9 there were numerous release parties held worldwide – with parties taking place from Italy, to the US, to Romania to Bangladesh and more. During this time we saw a lot of excellent event reports posted to mailing lists and on blogs of organizers and attendees letting everyone know how the party went and allowing us to see for ourselves through many pictures taken at the events. All of the parties were a great success.

Before I announce the winner of the Fedora laptop bag being offered for the Release Party Contest, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who participated. It takes a lot of work to plan and prepare for a release party and then after the event, write the event reports and gather up the photos of the event and posting them for everyone else in the Fedora community to see. The Fedora Ambassador Steering Committee and the Fedora community as a whole greatly appreciate the hours the volunteers spent making sure Fedora had a presence in their community and spreading information about the Fedora Project worldwide. This work helps build the community – both in increasing the number of Fedora users and finding more contributors to join the project. Thank you for all of your work.

We could only choose one winner of the Release Party Contest and it was difficult to do so. In selecting a winner FAmSCo took a number of items into consideration, including what types of events happened at the party, number of attendees, creativity and quality of the event report.

Amongst all of the great entries we received, it is my pleasure to announce the Los Angeles, California Release Party organized by Grady Laksmono as the winner!

Grady put a lot of work into the release party, not even being deterred when the Fedora 9 release date slipped. The event was held at the California State University in the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology and was attended by approximately 40 people.

Grady’s full event report and pictures are posted here:

http://laksmono.com/2008/05/23/los-angeles-fedora-9-release-party-success/

Thank you Grady for all of your work and we hope you enjoy the new laptop bag we will be arranging to have shipped to you.

Again – a huge thank you to everyone who helped organize a release party for Fedora 9!