Elections are open.

During the next week, Fedora contributors will vote for open seats on both the Fedora Project Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo). The polls are now open for both elections through the Fedora Election System. (Remember to login or you won't see the voting link for an election.) The elections will close on Wednesday, 2010-05-26 at UTC 23:59.

If you aren't familiar with how the system works, check out the Fedora Elections Guide. I also encourage Fedora community members to review the logs from our Town Hall meetings, where the candidates talked openly about their goals and viewpoints. Get informed, and then vote appropriately.

I thanked our election volunteers previously, but I also wanted to say a quick thanks to Mike McGrath and Mark Chappell on the Fedora Infrastructure team, who both ensured that the elections were set up properly and ready for business. Mark is actually working on application upgrades and better usability,which I hope we'll be able to use in the next regular election cycle. It's great to see a contributor jumping in to make a difference and improve the systems we use regularly.

Enough of my yakkin', whaddya say? Let's boogie. Go vote!

Quick links: (Board election)  (FESCo election)

The name game, no. 14.

The Fedora 14 name has been announced, and it's Laughlin.

Later this week our other election processes will be moving ahead as well. Paul Mellors and Larry Cafiero will post answers to the candidate questionnaire, and following that, John Rose will help kick off our series of live, IRC town hall meetings where our candidates will answer community questions. The coming elections of people to the Board and FESCo are probably more important than a release code name, so I want to thank our community in advance for their involvement, and especially our volunteers like Paul, John, and Larry for their assistance.

Post-Goddard.

Voting is now open for the Fedora 14 release name. Naming the next release is yet another way that our community is involved in making the future of Fedora. If you're a member of any group in Fedora (beyond completing the CLA), you can vote on this ballot.

To cast your vote for the F14 name, login at the elections site. May the best name win!

Playing hooky, 2010-04-30.

I'll be away from the keyboard for most of the day today to take in the weather, get some personal errands and other stuff done. Tonight I'm heading to a club with a friend to possibly suss out a potential opportunity for a long-term side gig (music, that is). I may check my email once or twice this afternoon or evening, and I should be back around this weekend off and on.

As a reminder, nominations for elections close this Sunday night 2010-05-02, so if you haven't thrown your personal fedora into the ring but want to, now's your chance!

Upcoming dates.

On Saturday, April 24, we open nominations for the next round of elections for Fedora. Seats on both the Board and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) will be open.

FESCo is delegated responsibility for dealing with, among other things, the technical issues of production of the Fedora operating system. FESCo is an excellent place to contribute if you have a knack for technical issues that arise from building Fedora and providing its content to millions of users every day. FESCo’s mission and other useful information are found here on the wiki.

The Board is a group that is much like a board of directors for a company, dealing with big-picture issues such as vision and growth of the project as a whole. The Board’s mission and other useful information are found on its wiki page.

Elections help the Fedora community maintain a strong voice throughout the leadership of the Fedora Project. Like all elections, they work best when they are not seen as a popularity or name recognition contest but rather as a way of finding nominees who the community feels are well equipped to lead in the areas that each group covers. I hope interested community members will not only consider nominating, but also use their votes in a considered manner.

I want to extend sincere and deep gratitude to John Rose and Larry Cafiero for volunteering to work on the elections this cycle, dealing with the IRC town halls and nominee questionnaires. Thanks guys!

Also, expect news very shortly about the opening of name suggestions for the next release, Fedora 14!

To distract readers while I write a real post.

Election extensions.

As seen here on the fedora-advisory-board list:

Although Mike McGrath and the Infrastructure team don’t expect the server relocation to affect our upcoming elections, we want to make sure the community’s ability to vote is not unnecessarily affected given the timing.

The original voting period was December 8-15, and the infrastructure move is occurring over the weekend of the 12th:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2009-December/msg00000.html

https://fedorahosted.org/fedora-infrastructure/ticket/1845

I talked this morning with Mike, John Rose, and Nigel Jones, and here’s the plan we arrived at:

• The voting period will start on December 5 instead of December 8. This ensures that, no matter what unforeseen circumstances occur, there will be a full weekend of uninterrupted voting time available to all community members. All townhalls will be finished by that point, since none are planned for FUDCon at this time.
• Although Mike and the Infrastructure team believe they can keep the elections open throughout the move, in the event of any substantial outage (8 hours or more), we will extend the end of voting by an additional day. For any additional day of outage, we’ll extend the end of voting by another additional day. Again, we aren’t expecting to have to do this, but it’s better for us to have a plan ahead of time. If there is no outage, voting will end on December 15 as originally planned.
• Nigel is preparing a change to the elections app that will allow a logged in user to check the accuracy of a previously recorded vote. This will give an additional measure of confidence in the election system, even in the event of a brief outage. If any user detects a problem, they can report it via IRC, email to the infrastructure list, or a Trac ticket.

We’ll be putting announcements out elsewhere as well — but as Darren noted, there’s nothing wrong with getting your vote in early!

Nominations.

Worth a separate post — nominations are still open for various spots in the upcoming Fedora elections until the end of the day tomorrow. Officially that’s 2359 UTC on 2009-11-16. I wanted to thank all the folks who have thrown their names into a ring, for being willing to take on a potential leadership role in the Fedora community. To all of you, good luck!

Board results.

The Fedora Board election results and the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee election results have been posted. Thank you to all those who voted, and to all those who ran for election. I’d like to welcome Dennis Gilmore and Tom ‘spot’ Callaway back to the Board, and also a special welcome to “Marvelous” Mike McGrath as our new member.

The results of the Fedora 12 release name election will be announced on Saturday as part of my keynote at FUDCon Berlin 2009.

It does count.