[NOT Important] Council Elections - Automn 2018 - My Take

[rabimba (Rabimba Karanjai)]

We should have just finished our council election voting yesterday.
Unlike most other people I decided to embark on a pretty irrational way to vote. And I also decided to jot down how I voted in an impartial way regardless of campaign.

I would love to get some opinions on what you think about the approach (I know it’s probably bad, read the disclaimer). And also just a tidbit which I realized after @mkohler pointed it out to me.

I decided to vote for the person who I thought would be better suited for the role based on their perceived personality. Instead of the campaign Q&A.
This was solely done based on their Q&A responses in discourse. I intentionally did not add reps profile data to it. And by time constraint could not include the town hall meetings (even though I heard both recordings, they are not included in the process and not part of my little experiment).

In short I voted for

If you want to learn more about how I came with this and the explanation behind my decision.
Head over to : https://blog.rabimba.com/2018/10/voting-impartially-for-fun-and-profit.html

[mkohler (Michael Kohler)]

First of all, no need to prefix your topics with “Not important”

When I first saw your approach I was amazed. This is a quite creative way to approach the elections. As I said before, the corpus you had is probably not enough to do “real” profiles, so I’m even more impressed that you’re prediction was right (even though it was by your own selection). This is definitively a creative approach and very interesting on the technology side. Definitely lacks some D&I aspects, but you already already included that in your disclaimer.

Now, let’s go for the real discussion here, since you’re saying that you were new to the program and didn’t have a clue who to vote for, what would have made that easier for you? What was missing to form a content-wise opinion? We’re always looking for ways to improve and I think that’s the perfect place to start!

Happy to hear your thoughts!

Cheers
Michael

[rabimba (Rabimba Karanjai)]

since you’re saying that you were new to the program and didn’t have a clue who to vote for, what would have made that easier for you? What was missing to form a content-wise opinion? We’re always looking for ways to improve and I think that’s the perfect place to start!

About that.
I still have plenty of questions about the program and different aspects of it. Which I just don’t ask because I’m lazy (and they are not blocker).
But a simple solution for procrastinators like me can be a F.A.Q on the Reps program. A real FAQ comprised of real questions asked by new on boarding reps like me throughout the period the program has been alive. Reps is a pretty old program, so I would guess it could have had a really thick FAQ section from all the questions different mentors had to answer (I guess sometimes repeatedly?). And pretty sure I would again ask something similar which somebody in past have asked and got answer. So the FAQ would help immensely .
TL;DR1: Make a Q&A FAQ collection. Even if we start now. It should be pretty good within a year or two

On a broad level, the new restructuring (with functional, mission driven etc) has made the field even more obscure to me. I have very less visibility into what exactly the purpose of a Rep should be.
Wasn’t really a problem for me, since I treat this as just a reporting ground for my activities. But that surely can’t be the program.
The wiki’s paint a very broad picture of what the activities of a Rep can be (which I would say literally includes everything). But if I take that definition, not sure how Rep at present supports those functions?
These are all n00b-sh questions. Which I am sure anyone who is in the program actively maybe just a year can answer. But these are the things which I have no idea about (among many other things). Hence the FAQ

And also the reason, I had to resort to personality traits, since the campaign couldn’t appeal to me

[hmitsch (Henrik Mitsch)]

Wow! Thanks for sharing this and the extensive blog post!

-Henrik

[rabimba (Rabimba Karanjai)]

I still wanted to include the townhall video transcripts.
But maybe next election

Meanwhile wondering if this is accurate enough that I can detect writers based on writing (or atleast their similar inclination)

[mkohler (Michael Kohler)]

I still have plenty of questions about the program and different aspects of it. Which I just don’t ask because I’m lazy (and they are not blocker).
But a simple solution for procrastinators like me can be a F.A.Q on the Reps program. A real FAQ comprised of real questions asked by new on boarding reps like me throughout the period the program has been alive. Reps is a pretty old program, so I would guess it could have had a really thick FAQ section from all the questions different mentors had to answer (I guess sometimes repeatedly?). And pretty sure I would again ask something similar which somebody in past have asked and got answer. So the FAQ would help immensely .

We indeed have a FAQ at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Reps/FAQ which is heavily outdated indeed. Therefore my question to you to list questions we have. This is something we want to improve in the near future and is on my TODO list. Therefore we need exactly feedback like you just gave. There is no way for seasoned Reps to come up with this as we are too deep into it.

On a broad level, the new restructuring (with functional, mission driven etc) has made the field even more obscure to me. I have very less visibility into what exactly the purpose of a Rep should be.

Yep, acknowledged and we should document these expecations and descriptions somehwere.

The wiki’s paint a very broad picture of what the activities of a Rep can be (which I would say literally includes everything). But if I take that definition, not sure how Rep at present supports those functions?

Another task on my list, the current Reps definition on the Wiki (as well as the Portal and other sources) are not 100% reflecting the Program’s direction anymore.

Thanks!