On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 03:16:04PM -0700, Don Armstrong wrote: > Hopefully this thread which doesn't seem to die will finally hammer it > into people that having the ability to vote in a Debian election means > that they need to spend some time on their own to review the related > -vote threads, examine the changes that are being made, and think for > a while about what the options that they are voting on are going to > do. In elections for governments, it is a custom to have just before the elections a debate among the most important parties, one has reviews of party's viewpoints by commentators in newspapers et al. The reason is that the vast majority of the electorat doesn't have the time nor expertise to read and judge on the full program of those where one can vote for, because they are lengty, and complicated. One also often has a 'kieswijzer', a tool where a few dozen questions about your opinion are asked, handling exactly about the differences among parties, which at the end gives a nice chart which party has the same viewpoint, and which not. Within Debian, some of these problems for voters exist too. The social contract is relatively lengty, considering every word can be important. Also, I think I can safely assume that the majority of DD's are no experts in legalese texts dissecting, where it is very important to exactly know the meaning of certain words. Heck, the majority(?) of DD's doesn't even have English as their native language. Thus, also for DD's it can easily happen they don't have time nor the necessary expertise to fully understand what a give ballot is about, even if the ballot itself is complete. Therefore, I think also within Debian, it can be very useful to have objective pro's and con's of proposals, a debate between a few knowledgable people (not a 200+ messages flamewar, that doesn't help), etc. I notice that this vote, this is a bit happening more or less already by means of those vote advices, though not all of them are very objective. --Jeroen -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357) http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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