2016 SPI board elections

Greetings to all, and in particular to those I have not had the chance
to collaborate with yet.
Yesterday I became a SPI member, apparently thanks to Martin
Zobel-Helas, just in time for the 2016 SPI board elections, in which I
was able to vote.

Position statements

Joshua D. Drake

Just one comment on a specific statement, Joshua's. It contains:
> Getting business items in order such as proper insurance and
> professional services.

What this means is vague for me (I fail to see what "business items"
means concretely).

General

Most statements say a lot more about what one has done than about what
one intends to do. There's still one easy information about who
candidates are which is usually missing : their age.

My vote

I had never heard about half of the candidates. I read all of the
platforms, but many candidatures were difficult for me to compare. I
ordered the candidates this way:
> Jimmy Kaplowitz
> -
> Luca Filipozzi
> Craig Small
> Martin Zobel-Helas
> -
> Valerie Young
> Peter Eisentraut
> Tim Potter
> Stephen Frost
> -
> Andrew Tridgell
> R. Tyler Croy
> Philip Balister
> Joshua D. Drake
> Joerg Jaspert

I put dashes between candidates who left me significantly different
impressions. A candidate above a certain dashed line seemed more
preferable to me than one below that same line.
Since I could not express indifference between 2 candidates and express
a preference between those candidates and others at the same time, I
ranked some candidates randomly. The result follows:

> Your vote will be kept confidential. To make it possible for you to
> verify that your vote was counted it will be associated with a secret
> cookie in the result:
>
> |0259f9f5fc582feb6b85db2d377a239b HEJMLDIFKBACG|
>

I ranked candidates based on what their statements said about their
achievements, their goals, and my prior perception of them. Being a
long-time Debian developer, my ranking surely shows some bias. I was
hoping for commitments to transparency but did not read much on that.

I have had positive interactions with Martin, who recently showed
concern for transparency. As it took more than a year for my own
application to be processed, I liked Jimmy's statement because it
mentioned there was a problem with delays (although it did not
specifically mention membership delays).

Most candidates have an impressive background. There was a single
candidate I considered putting below "None of the Above"... but there
was no NOTA anyway. Thanks to all those offering themselves.

Voting issue

After entering my ranking, I clicked the "Cast Vote" button. I was not
expecting this to fail and therefore did not pay huge attention, but it
seems it failed. I believe the same page reloaded. What I had entered in
the field was not lost. After I clicked the button a second time, my
vote was successfully cast.

As I was not extremely attentive, there may be a ~ 1% chance I did not
properly click the button. This does not mean there was a server-side
issue, but the client was Firefox 45 on Windows 10, which is really
reliable for such simple pages.

Issue tracking

The desire to properly report this presumed issue brings me to a
meta-issue: does SPI not have an issue tracking system?
I only found related discussion in a 2012 IRC log, from 21:15 to 21:18:
http://www.spi-inc.org/meetings/logs/2012/2012-04-12-log.txt