Robert, you raise an extremely valid point.  Last year we had 129
unique voters for the proposals, roughly unchanged from Asheville
(119).  Both cases FAR fewer than the number of delegates (and more
importantly, the number of people that wanted to be delegates).

Now, any citizen of a western-style democracy knows that 40-something
percent turnout for an election is generally an indicator of electoral
ambivalence (or a general trust that their fellow citizens aren't
going to elect Pol Pot), but I have a sinking feeling that Code4Lib
(based on the crush to get in the door) is no western-style democracy.
 These numbers, to me, sound far more like ignorance of the system
than antipathy.  The lack of emails I get every year about the
diebold-o-tron from people that don't understand how to sign up, vote,
etc. also makes my spidey sense tingle.

As I stated previously, I would expect people to advertise their talks
to differentiate themselves from the pack (and, in this year's case, a
VERY large pack).  That fact that we don't have any consistent policy
written anywhere, if somebody has a grievance with somebody else's
actions, is our own fault.  We have some guidelines in the CFP:

"Prepared talks are 20 minutes (including setup and questions), and
focus on one or more of the following areas:

* tools (some cool new software, software library or integration platform)
* specs (how to get the most out of some protocols, or proposals for new ones)
* challenges (one or more big problems we should collectively address)

The community will vote on proposals using the criteria of:

* usefulness
* newness
* geekiness
* diversity of topics

Please follow the formatting guidelines:

== Talk Title: ==

* Speaker's name, affiliation, and email address
* Second speaker's name, affiliation, email address, if second speaker

Abstract of no more than 500 words."

but if people feel strongly about this, we should really have
something we can point to (not saying anything's "enforceable", of
course) to try to rectify the situation before people start
complaining publicly over nothing.

Honestly, we should have quite a few more policies, as well
(conduct/behavior, harassment, etc. -- things you don't want to have
to address "after the fact"), but the precedent needs to start
somewhere.

-Ross.
p.s. 133 voters, so far, this year.

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 11:23 AM, McDonald, Robert H.
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I will speak to this one time and then I am done.
>
> My attempts at advertising the vote were to make more people aware of it
> and to get more votes in general. That is the democratic way. In fact
> there have been comments added to these posts on our OLE blog from
> code4lib members. During my time in hosting the event I met many new
> comers to the conference who were unaware of the voting no matter how much
> publicity we did for that for the proposals as well as for the keynotes.
>
> I was just trying to get some publicity for the conference, especially
> since I am a sponsor. If my posts are causing you problems I am glad to
> change them to fit to whatever policy you may have on voting but that is
> the thing this is an unconference so there are not really any policies on
> voting other than an interest and a code4ilb account, and in fact this
> process is confusing to first timers.
>
> Ross is right this has not really helped our OLE proposals but it has
> gotten more votes for the conference I bet and more publicity for the
> upcoming conference which is as stated sold out.
>
> Please do let me know if your policy changes and I can reflect that in
> posts I use to publicize your event or if there are other policies on
> publicizing your event that myself or other sponsors or even event
> volunteers should know about. My efforts were only done with the best
> intentions of getting the word out about your event and those of you who
> know me I am sure will understand that.
>
>
> Cheers
>
> Robert
>
>
> **********************************
> Robert H. McDonald
> Associate Dean for Library Technologies and Digital Libraries
> Associate Director, Data to Insight Center-Pervasive Technology Institute
> Executive Director, Kuali OLE
> Indiana University
> Herman B Wells Library 234
> 1320 East 10th Street
> Bloomington, IN 47405
> Phone: 812-856-4834
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Skype/GTalk: rhmcdonald
> AIM/MSN: rhmcdonald1