Our second community election process to choose two at-large Directors for the board of the Drupal Association concluded with the successful election of Morten Birch Heide-Jørgensen (mortendk) of Denmark and Pedro Cambra (pcambra) of Spain. The result was ratified today by the Drupal Association board. Morten and Pedro's terms begin on 1st November 2012. Steve Purkiss and Donna Benjamin will continue to sit on the board until our terms expire in February 2013. The nomination committee has a separate process underway to fill the Class Director vacancies on the board.

A very strong field of 17 candidates nominated themselves to "represent and reflect" the community at the board table. I would like to thank all the nominees for standing up to be counted, for their willingness to participate in the election process, and for their commitment to making the Drupal Association a stronger organisation. I hope they all continue to participate in and support the work we do.

  • Floh Klare - (SirFiChi)
  • Todd Tomlinson - (toddtomlinson)
  • J. Matthew Saunders - (MatthewS)
  • Chris Ward - (chrischinchilla)
  • Valery Lourie - (valthebald)
  • Aimee Maree Forsstrom - (amaree)
  • Narayan Newton - (nnewton)
  • David Stoline - (dstol)
  • Joseph Bachana - (joebachana)
  • Pedro Cambra - (pcambra)
  • Jeremy Thorson - (jthorson)
  • Simon Hobbs - (sime)
  • Morten Birch Heide-Jørgensen - (mortendk)
  • Steven De Costa - (starl3n)
  • Bert Boerland - (bertboerland)
  • Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire - (horncologne)
  • Forest Mars - (forestmars)
To learn more about the 2013 election and details on each candidate see the nomination list and my earlier election2013 blog posts.

1467 votes were cast out of a pool of 264,911 eligible voters (0.55%). This is an improvement over the last election when 655 votes were cast out of a pool of 273,005 voters (0.24%). 

The process we used to run the elections was designed by the community through transparent discussion on groups.drupal.org, prior to the last elections. We decided to adopt a broad definition of eligible voter. All those with an account on Drupal.org who have been active in the past year are eligible to vote. The alternative was to restrict eligibility to financial members of the Drupal Association. We also decided to use a preferential voting system. If you are interested in the background on these decisions you may like to review these two posts on groups.drupal.org.

The new board of directors will come together for a board planning retreat in San Francisco, 5-6 November 2012, immediately following BADcamp.

Comments

sun’s picture

Congratulations to @mortendk and @pcambra! :)

For everyone who did not vote due to the bad-ass usability, please contribute here:
http://drupal.org/node/674112

I almost gave up myself, and only spent the extra minutes to resolve the form validation errors, because I had a strong desire to vote.

I can perfectly imagine that a majority of eligible voters did not vote due to the utterly complex interface and passed on it instead. Do we have page view vs. voters statistics for that, by any chance? (I see GA in the page source.)

Thanks! :)
sun

kattekrab’s picture

Thanks Sun.

Yes, the ranking UI in Decisions module sux. No question.

There is no D7 version for Decisions, and we are likely to be running D7 be the time the next election rolls around. So I would like some help on the election committee of evaluating alternative modules to run the election.

Obvious contenders are these.
http://drupal.org/project/election
http://drupal.org/project/advpoll

However @jenlampton suggested on twitter that perhaps webform could do it, and @attiks proposed http://drupal.org/project/webform_draggable_list - but I'm not sure that gives us the voting logic we need. whereas the election, advpoll and decisions modules all implement various voting algortithms.

Last election it was suggested we should adopt the Single Transferrable Vote algorithm, and election module claims to support that. So I'd be keen to explore that direction further.

I posted on GDO - which might be a better place to continue this conversation?
http://groups.drupal.org/node/260848

sun’s picture

I patched Decisions module instead:
http://drupal.org/node/674112#comment-6586262

kattekrab’s picture

This is great Sun. But there's no D7 version of decisions, and it seems to be abandoned. :(

Elections module looks like a better path for the future - would it be equally trivial to add drag and drop there?
http://drupal.org/project/election

sethcohn’s picture

As an active promoter of Approval Voting (during my time away from Drupal, in the NH Legislature, the last 2 years, I cosponsored a bill to move to Approval Voting), keeping it alive in Drupal, it's the least I can do. Sponsorships welcome are welcome.

pjcdawkins’s picture

It might well be equally trivial. The reason drag-and-drop was not initially envisaged for Election was that in STV (its first use case) you have to allow users to rank only SOME candidates. Unlike the DA election, though, the Election STV module will 'grey out' the <select> options you've already chosen (provided equal ranking is not allowed), and there's a 'Clear form' link to reset choices.

mcfilms’s picture

Did any progress happen on this? I think the draggable ranking system is a fantastic and intuitve feature. Seems a shame it's not available out-of-the-box in a Drupal 7 site. I guess it could be rigged with Draggable Views and some custom php.

jcnventura’s picture

While being an amazing improvement over last year's election. Still less than 1%? While I would agree that part of it is because the UX of the vote s*ck*d big time, we do need to promote it better. Even though the election was on the frontpage of g.d.o, I don't think it ever got to the frontpage of d.o itself.

I see a parallel here with the low session submission count for DrupalCon Sidney (everyone reading this: submit a session!!). We've lost the ability to create news and announcements to the Drupal Community. And I blame it all on the redesigned d.o front page.

For more on that see also http://drupal.org/node/1468184, and help to make d.o useful as a content source again.

jcnventura’s picture

I just saw the frontpage again, and yes the election news announcement is there.. Funny that I looked for it the first time and couldn't find it. Must say something either about my eyesight or the News block.. Why do I care if the drupal.org marketplace was upgraded? Voting should have been a sticky on top of that list, and not have been relegated to 2nd place 2 days after the elections opened.

Dig1’s picture

Yes I wanted to vote when I saw the announcement come up on drupal.org/planet. I went to the listing of candidates and read the voting procedure about listing candidate in preference...I then started reading the first, then the second...by which time I had forgotten about the first...likewise for the third...then after 10 minutes I lost the will to carry on because there was so much information and the process was complicated!

Consequently I suggest that in future we have a table with columns and the candidates are listed in alphabetical order. The first column is a photo, second 'What I do', third 'Where I am', fourth 'What I have done in Drupal/Community', fifth 'What I want to do in Drupal/Community', sixth 'How I will do that'.

Then each field will be restricted to a certain size and voters can scan the table, quickly assimilate the information presented and then make decisions on who to vote for.

We don't want or need lots of text because it will confuse and discourage voters.... We need to make it a 4 minute max process for voters. To get more involvement the voting process needs to be simpler and better publicised.

Just my 2 pence (cents) worth...:)

mcfilms’s picture

+1 for Dig1's comment. Although I patiently reviewed the nominees, it's pretty clear why most members did not vote. I think it has less to do with the UI of the voting module and more to do with getting to know the candidates in less than an hour.

Mr. Nx’s picture

My best wishes to the Newly elected DA members. Looking forward to a prosperous (developmentally) tenure.

Thanks to the retiring team for what you have done for the drupal society! Best wishes......

Monicab’s picture

I'm sorry, but where does it say they are retiring? I don't see it in the original post, but maybe I am just not reading it with enough care.

Monicab’s picture

I got it, thanks.

Monica and company

k0teg’s picture

"the nomination list" link is broken (it leads to https://association.drupal.org/comment/reply/%E2%80%9Dhttps://associatio...).

kattekrab’s picture

oops. fixed! :) thanks.