My point was, that as juiceme calculated 1,53% of people voted. The questions is how many who don't vote act like negatrons in here, shout here and there whant this and that, and when it comes to two clics the negatrons are gone, and 83 are left.

The bridge will be there, have a little faith - that is the attitude we need in this community.

To start with, most people are here to read TMO. It is not immediately obvious that talk.maemo.org is different from everything_else.maemo.org and that you need two accounts to be eligible to vote. That alone is an unnecessary complication and one thatmalmost stopped me from voting the first time. Why is it so difficult?

Another thing. You say 1.5% of those eligible to vote bothered. Is "those eligibile to vote" the same as "the number of invitations sent"? I would normally assume yes, but with the two accounts absurdity, I no longer assume anything.

Yes, it is a bit confusing. For example I myself mistakenly asseted in this same thread few days back that you need a garage account to vote, when it actually is you need a Maemo account...

Maemo Veterans could elaborate on this, but I guess the multiple account thing is somewhat legacy; Maemo.org started as Nokia sponsored/owned developer forum while TMO started as ITT, an independent Nokia-tablets-forum that was later given/donated/sold to Nokia. At some point in time these were brought together but the 2-account-dichotomy persisted.

Techstaff might shed a light on this, would it be difficult or impossible to somehow harmonize these things...
I know that currently the "All things Maemo" are hosted on a virtual cluster composed of 7 differenf VM's, loosely coupled together.


The number 5483 is voting invitations sent.

This is calculated by the voting engine based on the given electorate criteria; in this case you had to have a Maemo account with 10 or more karma to be eligible. It well might be possible that somebody has only Maemo account and no TMO account at all, I think.

Actually the set of voters that received the mailing might contain some "dead/unused" accounts, people no longer desiring to have anything to do with Maemo. There was one case of a person contacting us after the invitations were sent, asking to be removed from the mailing list since he no longer was intrested.

Maemo.org and ITT were two separate entities with the latter being owned by Reggie. Although Nokia got ITT to adopt the TMO name it paid Reggie annual chargers for hosting and maintaining the forum in return presumably.

This is why different accounts exist as one was based on servers at Nokia while ITT/TMO accounts were based on Reggie's own servers.

While Nokia allow HiFo to use the Maemo trademarks etc, Reggie donated his database to HiFo in return for the pre-existing privacy policies being respected AFAIK. At no point was TMO sold or donated to Nokia. It always remained Reggie's property hence his ability to donate it to HiFo without interference from Nokia.

The current situation is messy because of this inherent division.


Edit: About the lack of votes, some perspective needs to be brought in. At any one point of time TMO on average has 40-<100 members online. The most users online in recent times was IIRC during Jolla's launch or one of their announcements. That too numbered less than 1,000.

So getting 83 voters is actually not that bad a statistic considering many people may be passive members and wouldn't want to cast "wrong" votes. Maybe chemist can be pressed to release the average number of active members with the condition being active at least once a week for a proper co-relation with the voting figures.

My bet: about 90. And a few only came back because they got an e-mail.

Nailed it, with slight touch-ups.

Maemo is a hogpodge of services, all of which were on separate machines under Nokia's run. Garage & autobuilder tited, but separate systems, the main site & blogs were another (under Midgard CMS), wiki, bugs, SQLdb, all their own things, and TMO/ITT is vBulletin based. All started separately and got blended together over time as the staff at Nokia / Nemien saw fit. Reggie was employed by Nokia to bring in and run his forum under their domain (TMO vs ITT), but the content was always his. It wasn't until he donated TMO to HiFo that it all came legally under one roof.

The 7 VMs emulate what was the reality. It was a hassle just getting the systems up and running again after the hand off from Nokia. Techstaff currently lacks the helpers needed to keep some of the basics even running (bugtracker/Midgard maintainers especially), yet alone improve on them. There are reasons for that, but suffice to say, I do not see the above being an easily accomplished task. Changing the voting subsystem (which is just a set of php scripts in a folder or two) is more manageable.

Correct. One need not have a TMO account at all to vote. In fact, the only requirement is a maemo.org account with sufficient Karma. The voting scripts simply follow the rules setup by the community for elections. Don't like them? Change them (the rules, then the scripts, in that order). There's a process for Council to do so upon community request.

There are also several that bounce as undeliverable, and more that go to abandoned mailboxes, I'm sure. We had several in the cycles I helps with where people complained of not getting a token only to find the e-mail address was some old thing they don't use/check/maintain anymore.

Really, the main reason to have any qualification at all is to prevent multi-voting. Find a solution that allows each person to vote only once, provides verifiable and transparent results, get community buy-in, and update the rules via referendum. Simple? With only ~80 people voting, you just need about 40 people to agree to it and you're good.

With the rate of decline, we have about 2 years before the only ones voting will be the candidate(s) anyway. At that point, who needs a voting system?

Let me copy a message from :

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...79#post1436479

{

I like the idea of engagement but I would suggest to have donated once or twice a year will validate you as an active member and with no requirement on the amount to make sure we're not losing anyone ....

Like a 0,02 EUR heartbeat each 6 months period to match the MC election and we'll asking donators to promise to vote on next election ...

Pay to vote .. I am unsure this brilliant idea will be welcomed by all :-)


And I am wondering how many "active members" will this reach ?
}

well the system will be the same for next election all you can do to help this is attracting tmo members to care about it ... Any idea is welcome ...

The easy one is just to paste this text in members's signature :

Let's see where this viral democracy experience will go ...

Feel free make variations it will be fun to see the influences on our social group ...