[NCUC E-team] Elections

[Tapani Tarvainen]

Bill tells me I'm the only one who knows how NCUC elections
were done last time. In a level I guess that's true - although
I think more people should know _what_ was done (as it was
discussed on various mailing lists, EC and e-team in particular),
but as for _how_, I did most of the technical stuff involved
and perhaps nobody else followed it too closely.

Election process is already underway so I guess this may be already
too late, but anyway:

Bill: "I guess a main question is whether we need to ask people to
email her and verify their addresses (we did last year via you so I
assumed that was the best option)"

Perhaps a brief history is in order: in spring '14 I took
over NCUC member database, or rather built it from several
sources, mainly NCSG member list (spreadsheet) and NCUC's
old website (which had members' own pages). The former
had various errors (members listed under wrong constituency &c)
and the latter was incomplete (not all members had signed
in there as it required a separate process), and both had
outdated email addresses, contact persons &c.

So we decided to clean it up by sending everybody a message
with their current info and asking them to confirm that or
send corrections if needed. For those who didn't respond
another message was sent later, for bounced addresses
using alternate address or additional representative
if known, and remaining ones were investigated with
various means (looking at organization websites,
messages sent to mailing lists &c).
The process was repeated in the fall prior to the
elections, a message calling for people to check
themselves in the website was sent to discussion list,
and all who'd responded to NCSG's activity check were
also considered confirmed.

Approximately 70% of members (212) were eventually contacted
one way or another, of these were removed (as duplicates or
by their own request; they were kept in the database to allow
restoring them in case of some error, now those should be
removed completely), so now the state distribution in the
database now looks like this:

 state |   description   | count
-------+-----------------+-------
     0 | new             |    83
     1 | old, unverified |    89
     2 | confirmed       |   207
     3 | removed         |     5

Returning to Bill's question above, the key issue is what
should be done about the unverified ones. If memory serves,
the plan was to send new verification request before this
year's election and update the database accordingly.

I guess that could still be done, it won't take long apart
from the time needed to make corrections people send in.
Alternatively, we can make a public version of the ballot
list (like, add marker to the members list in the web
indicating inactive state) and send a request to the
discussion list asking people to check it (a bit late for
that though) or simply send the ballot to unverified members
as well (several of them will bounce but that's no big deal).

-- 
Tapani Tarvainen