I personally would like one of two things to happen:

1) as Dan suggested, have only people registered for the conference vote.

or

2) have the voting completed before registration. 

The reason for #1 had been already outlined by Dan. The reason for #2 is that it is easier to ask for money from administrators to attend a conference if you can point to specific sessions that are relevant to you position. 

Edward

--
Edward M. Corrado

On Nov 30, 2011, at 8:25 PM, "Michael B. Klein" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> IIRC, we've gone around on this before. It's been argued (possibly by me,
> but definitely by others) that those *not* attending the con have a stake
> in the outcomes, too, what with the streaming and the archiving and whatnot.
> 
> I agree that blatant electioneering is a problem -- every year, there are a
> bunch of people who sign up for accounts just to vote for a particular
> presentation. My hope has always been that since those people care enough
> to go that far, they might take a minute to read through the rest of them
> and realize that there might be more to this than just the proposal they
> came to shill for. Some of them might stick around and/or get involved.
> Maybe.
> 
> In any case, I'm interested to see how effective this current "call for
> support" is.
> 
> On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> Hey folks:
>> 
>> I'm not going to be attending code4lib yet again in 2012 (alas), so treat
>> this with a grain of salt, but I wanted to point out that at least one
>> project is encouraging their community to sign up for code4lib accounts and
>> vote for their project's proposals.
>> 
>> This seems rather gauche to me, and if left unchecked in future
>> conferences, likely to lead to election-style pandering & the likelihood
>> that we'll miss out on higher-quality proposals that don't have an army of
>> ballot stuffers to whip into a frenzy or who are too honourable to engage
>> in such behaviour. That would be an unfortunate future for the conference,
>> in my opinion.
>> 
>> It's too late to do anything about it this year, but a thought for next
>> year: maybe voting gets limited to those who register for the conference so
>> that voters have some skin in the game (that is, their precious time and
>> travel expenses). Proposals could be made before registration, but voting
>> would occur after registration (with attendance slots held for speakers,
>> naturally).
>> 
>> Dan Scott
>>