@RebeccaChernoff: Great! I'm not familiar with the Town Hall chat format.. is it supposed to be a structured discussion/Q&A with a chat moderator, or a more free-form discussion?
Somewhere in between? People are free to pose questions as they wish, but most have fallen naturally into a "person asks" -> "candidates answer" -> "once candidates have answered, someone else asks" format
All the sites that have had elections so far have had them if you want to look at ones that have been held already.
@Seamus, @Joseph: I'm not sure I wanted to know that Seamus has nothing to loose, but he certainly has nothing to lose. Go on, nominate yourself, I dare you.
@AlanMunn I was asking the same question a few days before. Caramdir and I tested it and I couldn't see his edit. To see the "to be approved" list you need 10k. No idea how this should work.
`@MartinTapankov Honestly I don't really see the point of having more candidates, given the high quality of the current slate. Is there some benefit to us as a group to have more?
@MartinScharrer I see. So we have an unusable power. Oh well.
@AlanMunn: I was only half-joking. In all seriousness, I was thinking to withdraw my nomination, as there are enough quality candidates already (and my top 3 choices are already in the list).
@MartinTapankov So now maybe our strategy should be to harrass people to withdraw, so that we avoid an election altogether. Much tricker to pull off, though. :-)
@MartinScharrer I see. Well if things sort themselves out, fine. The 10k requirement for tag-wiki edits seems very high for this group. But soon enough more people will hit it so it won't really be a problem anyway.
@AlanMunn I think as long as the 10k people are only expected to approve edits, rather than actually write all the tag wikis, then it's not too high a cap. As long as people who know enough to suggest edits do so...
@AlanMunn Yeah I agree. I think there are a couple of other similar "hidden gems" that don't seem to be linked. Perhaps there should be a meta post listing them, at least?
How does the voting work? Do we all get a certain number of votes? Is it top three plurality winners? (As someone who's read a little about social choice theory, I'm interested...)
I'd like to reiterate my thoughts that having a lot of candidates is a sign of a healthy site: it says that here are a lot of people who care enough that this site exists to do something about it. I wouldn't be surprised if all the candidates are secretly thinking, "Actually, I sort of hope that I don't get voted in.". But please, no-one should withdraw their nomination because everyone else is also thinking that.
Having lots of candidates is a sign that when there's a job that "everybody thinks somebody should do", then there are lots of people who are prepared to be the "somebodies".
So, @AlanMunn: go ahead, nominate yourself. I'll stop hassling people when the clock stops or we get to 10 candidates.
Anyway, here is something I have just added to github. It's a package that makes the structure colour of beamer presentations change slowly over the course of the presentation. Suggestions welcome. github.com/scmbradley/Beamer-colour-change-project
@lockstep: There are so many worthy candidates, so I decided it's better not to complicate the voting. Besides, I managed to nag you and @Caramdir into applying, for which I'm happy about.
@MartinTapankov: But there's no candidate with rep <3000 now. I feel like I'm part of a self-appointed elite! (And your "platform" was quite good, too -- forced me to think about my aims for the site.)
@lockstep: Be sure I'll nag all future moderators and meta users about the issues I brought forward. FWIW I edited my nomination to explain why I'm withdrawing, but there seems to be no way to read it right now (maybe mods can see it?)
Basically saying "Thank you all" for the support, and listed why I'm stepping down (too many worthy candidates, brought my favourite candidates to apply, no reason to complicate the voting process)
@lockstep It does sometimes feel like an addiction.
I recently decided not to buy one book because the parindent was too small and another because it was typeset raggedright. I guess those are typography geekery things rather than tex-specific...
@StefanKottwitz Ah good. thanks. Glad to be of service!
@StefanKottwitz Thunderbird is still complaining that http://texblog.net/feed/ is not a valid feed. Is this a Thunderbird problem? (It looks like it's working in firefox...)
@MartinScharrer That depends on whether you feel that it will influence how you vote
It's clearly not a 'political' election
If you look at some of the other SO sites there were/are very different views of the moderators role, whereas that does not seem to be the case for {TeX}
I read through the town hall chat for cooking. Since it seems like i won't be able to make it to our chat, here is the answer to the most important question (“What is your favorite ice cream?“): More or less everything from the Eissalon am Schwedenplatz :-)
@lockstep In a way, but in a way not - I suspect that all of the candidates would make excellent choices as moderators (usual disclaimer about myself, of course)
@Caramdir It may well come down to such vital issues :-)
Okay, it's late so I'll make one more pathetic attempt. \expandafter\election\newmoderators[3]{\thr@e@f{can't}{be}{bothered}{to}{list}{them}{all}{again}}
@lockstep: I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien, I'm an Englishman in .... Trondheim (and before that, Yorkshire, and before that, Stanford).
I'm definitely not eligible! Nah, voting rules are complicated and are a mix of residency and nationality. So far, there's yet to be an election where I qualify on both.
