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It is good that we are finally having elections. Of course given that we have three candidates for three posts this election will, most likely, not be terribly exciting. However, in general, it would be nice to have some sort of forum where users can pose questions to the candidates. A person's previous record can give us some idea of future behavior, but this can only be a very rough indicator of actual performance. The best way for users to be able to get to know candidates, and also to be able to select the best among them, would be by soliciting candidate responses to user-submitted questions. It is only such a public "stress-test" that can help reveal each candidate's best qualities and greatest flaws.

This suggestion comes too late for us to do anything for this election. But perhaps this is something that we should keep in mind as we look to future elections which might turn out to be far more hotly contested than this one. What are the community thoughts about the desirability or feasibility of having such an arrangement for future elections?

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An election getting 5 or 6 nominees is much better than struggling to get 3. I'm surprised by the community not having people put themselves forward for nomination. Having only 3 nominees means that the community is unable to voice its collective opinion and vote for the candidates they want to see elected.

I have been assisting communities put on Town Hall Chats so that the community can pose questions to the candidates to get a feel for different moderating styles. Again, this really only makes sense if there is truly an election, but if there is, I am absolutely happy to try and put one together as quickly as I can. Aside from that, the community is absolutely welcome to pose questions to the candidates here on meta with the tag.

For this election, if people think it would help, we can extend the nomination phase by a couple days to see if anyone else steps forward.

I added 2 days to the nomination phase. Maybe this will draw out a couple other nominations. At the very least, since there are now more than 3 nominations, it gives a bit of a buffer for the town hall chat to be scheduled.

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  • $\begingroup$ extending the nomination period for a few days might be a good idea. Just so we can have a "real" election. $\endgroup$
    – Deepak Vaid
    Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 17:33
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with you Rebecca, as you know - I also had concerns about being only the third candidate. $\endgroup$
    – Sklivvz
    Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 18:09
  • $\begingroup$ I would imagine that people who haven't nominated themselves yet have some reason for doing so that probably won't change in a couple of days. So I'm not sure whether we would actually get more nominations given more time. But I suppose it couldn't hurt. $\endgroup$
    – David Z Mod
    Commented Apr 3, 2011 at 21:31
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I totally favour this in either of two ways:

  1. Questions on meta
  2. A Q&A on the chat.
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If only three users would like to volounteer, there's not much point in this — you can't force a diamond upon the unwilling. SE Inc. employee Rebecca Chernoff, however, normally holds Q&A events on chat ("town hall chat"s) with moderator nominees to help people vote. Here's, for example, Unix's.

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