Hi, today I read the interviews with the 5 candidates and I wanted to vote. Well, that did not go as I hoped.
I came onto a page where I found the green Vote button but clicking it I received an error message saying: apart from the CLA group I have to join at least 1 other group. I did not know I signed up for any group but found out with the CLA group it is done automatically when you sign up and agree to the License Agreement.
It took me almost half an hour to find (some) groups but I have no idea which one to join. Why is this even necessary, canât I, with a FAS account, not just vote? Joining a group means applying first, only for the sake of being able to vote. Thatâs all I want to do.
Fedora does not make things easy.
Learn more about voting eligibility here: Elections Guide :: Fedora Docs. You can also check out Groups in Fedora :: Fedora Docs to learn about the non-CLA portion of the eligibility guide.
However, in my case even though I am indeed CLA+1, the Elections app complains that I need to be in one another group than CLA to vote. This is likely due to some temporary inconsistency in the Elections app, and since itâs not urgent, Iâll reach the admin/infra folks after the holidays.
Thank you @hricky, but I think I will just stop with my idea to vote. As I wrote in my first post I think Fedora makes things unnecessarily complicated. I am TL3, I am a member of the CLA group but that is not enough. Itâs a shame because there will be others like me who will not join a team just to be able to vote. Yes, you can stop being a team member after the election but is that fair towards the members of the team?
How does it look when I apply team membership and I write I only want to vote for the Fesco election and for that I need to be a member of a team. Which team would want me?
Thanks again for the info, but Iâm done with it. Sorry MĂĄirĂn, you would have gotten the maximum amount of points.
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The group membership requirement is to keep the trolls out 
You are not a troll and you put a case (forum regulars) that has not been addressed.
We in the Fedora Join SIG can give you a temporary membership to our SIG so you can vote.
Votes close on the 7th of Jan.
(EDIT: Due to the short time I have added you @jandemus and will remove you next week)
Are we entirely sure that this is a good or recommended practice?
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Jandemus has been here two years, read 21 thousand posts and recieved 158 âlikesâ and made over 400 posts. If that is the kind of person we want to keep out of Fedora, then please do let me know.
Iâm very happy to add him to Join on a temporary basis.
If some AI bots come and ask for membership Iâll be sure to turn them down.
That is wonderful news. Thank you so much.
I do hope, because there must be many more like me, that the rules will be checked , discussed and hopefully changed so exceptions like this one are no longer necessary.
Again thank you very much for making this exception, I will place my vote immediately.
Btw, did I really read 21.000 posts? No idea it was that many.
[EDIT} @theprogram , I placed my vote so if you want you can skip me from the Fedora Join SIG membership list.
Once again thank you very much, also @hricky thank you for your answers.
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Indeed. Hopefully, rather than needing workaround processes, weâd recognise that people who systematically give time to helping others on the forum are Fedora contributors, just as much as package maintainers and so on are.
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The vote of FESCo is highly critical: inappropriate outcomes can cause immediate harm to the community and Fedora Linux users, without the possibility to mitigate â it can render Fedora Linux unreliable and unpredictable. This is not the case with the Council, which shall add sufficient voice to the major community: it has a major impact and is the highest entity, everyone can vote, but they have not the potential to break Fedora Linux in the complex development and engineering processes throughout the many interrelations with other communities and projects.
This is not just to keep trolls out, but people who ainât experienced in very technical open source decision making: in the critical/complex areas, open source depends on much discipline and understanding of the own limitations â leading to a dominant dynamic between rough consensus decision making (as people tend to focus on what they have knowledge about in order to not risk their reputation), reputation (to convince towards rough consensus) and the need to convince (for achieving rough consensus & adoption of the preference by many developers/engineers who need to adopt in order to avoid splits).
E.g., achieving TL3 is comparably easy, and it does not prove to understand highly technical decisions, nor qualification to understand who is best suitable for current technical challenges and who is embedded with whom (upstream) and who has good standing among what developers in order to achieve adoption of decisions (keep in mind that FESCo deeply depends on reputation rather than having a power to enforce). Open Source Developing is complex in areas that need review and that have many dependencies.
Also, keep in mind that TL3 cannot be held responsible, as they are not known: FESCo is the major entity that can/shall ensure to identify / mitigate âunqualified or malicious accountsâ that can/want cause harm, e.g., when doing proposals. Giving FESCo voting power to TL3 would enable an easy attack on Fedora â if everyone can contribute to FESCo ballots just by having an FAS account, the outcome can be unpredictable, and Fedora development could end up with what we used to call ânetsplitâ in IRC (especially as FESCo can end up composed of people who do not have the qualification and/or standing to keep development and engineering together) 
Overlapping: this community is big and goes far beyond Discourse, and it is interwoven with many other communities and projects, on whose collaboration it depends. TL3 proves understanding of only a very small (and potentially isolated) share of that.
Additional entry barriers of FAS ensure that this cannot cause trouble as they need a sponsor who creates an entry barrier that needs to show some knowledge of the structure of the community. At the same time, no exploitation on a human side (single point of failure) is possible (exclusion due to personal opinions or so), as the processes are transparent and as far as possible reproducible, and a lot of sponsors exist for a lot of groups.
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I donât think anyone here advocated that TL3 would automatically grant a vote for FESCo.
The gap I see is that there isnât a CLA+1 group for Fedora contributors who do their contributions in the form of providing user support here. Such a group could indeed have some âgatekeepingâ / âsponsorshipâ rather than membership being purely automated from Discourse metrics.
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It was advocated for that in post 4. The CLA is not an actual group, but to create common ground in legal terms before people can act in areas that otherwise might cause legal trouble if no common ground is agreed among contributors.
That wasnât my interpretation, but @jandemus can clarify.
I meant this part:
I know, but I still didnât interpret that as âTL3 should automatically grant voting rightsâ. I read it as âTL3 is one of a number of factors that I could point to to demonstrate that Iâm part of the communityâ 
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As we say in Holland: I donât want to throw oil on to the fire, (I donât want to make things worse). Iâve read the @py0xc3 post and if the elections are that important then things should stay as they are/were. But then I would think a simple notification in the vote announcement about who is eligible to vote would be in place. This would have prevented all of this.
Creating a possibility for someone with level TL3 to become a group member to give him/her the right to vote is in my opinion a bad one. People who are a group member for at least a (half) year at the time of the election should be able to vote, new members just have to wait till the next round. First they need to prove they are worthy of being the group member they are.
I know this is a completely different post than my previous one but I now know about the importance of the election.
Please in the future: when an election is announced add a note who can vote so it is clear to everyone.
I hope I made my point with this post, I see there are several new posts already.
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I agree that communications is a problem here. We indeed need to improve communication about this. But I think this is currently not at the top of priority list, given more immediate issues 
However, maybe at some point someone can create changes to the respective software that elaborates at the very places better what and why something is going on. I presume the very piece(s) are somewhere in Fedora Infrastructure · GitHub
TL3 makes you experienced in our Discourse, and thus allows you to engage in the Discourse moderation decision making (-> Moderation Coordination category open for trust levels 3 and above).
Once someone gets engaged with the wider community, it is quickly from TL3 to the point at which it possible to vote in the Council ballot given the involvement in the Discourse, at which a lot comes together â if the developers/engineers do something that is not acceptable to the user base, the Council can intervene.
A major part of the working/interacting âLinux open source systemâ, a major advantage, is that people are more intuitively involved in decisions they are affected by and qualified for, rather than in (traditional) (social) systems in which people are involved in decisions for which they are neither qualified and maybe not even affected by. At the same time, we have a distribution of powers that is based on competition rather than a command-economy-like separation of powers: if someone does something that is not appreciated by others (who are not qualified to engage in the decision but affected by it), everyone can be replaced at any time (at the highest level, replace the operating system / community), creating incentives to create compromises that are fine for everybody.
This just underlines the importance of having the right people at the right place. I was promoted to TL3 some time ago and when I saw that I responded with: why me? There are others much more qualified than me. Well, it was because I was present on this forum for so long, day after day, I wrote posts, I answered them and that apparently is enough to become TL3 material.
Since then I did not do anything else than I was doing before becoming TL3, so I would kindly ask to lower me to TL2 and let me stay there. (if that is technically possible of course)
I am not a moderator nor shall I ever be one, and trust me: you donât want me as a moderator at all. When writing a post I have to read it, re-read it again and change things (sometimes a lot) before I can send it cause I do think about a lot of things differently than what is allowed here. I can be a hot head when I read something I donât like and start to write an answer immediately, which I know is wrong, so I delete it again. Sometimes I donât write an answer at all, sometime I wrote a self censored one. If I would just send the original text it would be my last here on this forum.
I would like to end this now, in the mean time I have edited my vote to 7 zeros for the 7 candidates so I wonât disturb the election. (I hope).
Please make me TL2 again and I will do my best to censor my own posts very strongly before I send them.
Thank you.
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You are not disrupting the elections. There are hundreds of voters, and all the candidates are qualified.
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<paragraph deleted>
Your topic here is justified, as we agreed, there is a problem with communication, and I wanted to clarify some of the background (add the âwhyâ to the âwhatâ).
If you donât feel safe at some âpowersâ you get as TL3, you are not forced to use them. That you see some of your own actions critical and think they should not go along with being exercised as moderator-like entity indicate you are aware of the responsibility and when to refrain from using it. But TL3 bring an alternative perspective to the moderation coordination, which is very useful and acts as a type of âbalancing from the communityâ.
What you can, and what you have qualified for, is this: Understanding Discourse Trust Levels (see TL3). As I said, you can use it, or not. You can engage in the moderation coordination and add your perspective, or not. Itâs always up to you â the promotion on itself does not go along with obligations.
If it is still your wish, I can lock you on TL2: just give me a âthumbs upâ or other indication: then I will do so. Otherwise, I see no issue to keep you TL3 (any contribution with your perspective is appreciated, but none is obligated), <deleted>.
Supplement: error in reasoning on my side⊠there is only the FESCo election open, which you stated you are not able to vote in, there is currently no Council or other election. Not sure what election you refer to, at which you have zeroed your votes???
Supplement 2: I misunderstood the preceding comment as I overlooked the condition/change that was introduced in the discussion by comment 5&7 â I removed a paragraph and a sentence that were based on false assumptions to avoid confusion.
Out of curiosity, had you ever heard of any of the seven candidates before reading their interviews?