Player Councilor elections - shorten future timeframe

Having only started following the FAF forums and news the start of this year I'd not come across the PC election before, but one thing that's surprised me is just how long the process has gone on for. To summarise the timings for the PC election that's almost now finished:

• 6 May 21 - election announced, candidates requested
• 30 May - Signups closed (includes 1 week extension to accommodate further debate following disqualification of certain candidates/clarification of conditions to apply)
• 6 June - voting begins
• 6 July - voting ends

So essentially, 3 months taken up with the PC election.

Regardless of whoever wins the current election, I'd suggest shortening this period significantly, as 1/4 of the PC's time will potentially be in 'election mode'.

I'd therefore suggest allowing 3 weeks for candidates, and then 3 weeks for voting, to halve the time involved overall, for next year's election, while still giving enough of a period to allow most people who might be on holiday at some point in that time to be able to stand and/or vote, without having the election go on for so long.

I'd also be curious if anyone has stats on the timeframe of when votes were cast, as I suspect they will be weighted significantly towards the start of the voting period (which would give further support for there not being a need for a whole month to vote). If this isn't the case and votes tend to be evenly spread over the time period (or even weighted more towards the end of the voting period) then it may still be worth retaining 4 weeks for voting.

Yes, we do have those stats.

The big things in my opinion are NOT having the council review period of candidates happen AFTER the discussion period (wasting everyone's time there), not restarting the discussion period because people were now removed, and not having the voting period last for a month. Generally I don't really see why an election should take more than 4 or 5 weeks. If it takes more, make an election result in a longer mandate. If it stays at a year, shorten the election period. Current situation sucks.

It'd be much simpler to just make the elections closed or appointed.

The majority of the community don't care to get involved in the elections or the drama that goes on in the upper echeleons of FAF society. For those that do, they get burned.

сам живи и другим не мешай

Most positions are closed or appointed. Moderation Councillor is voted upon by the current moderators. Balance Councillor is voted upon by the current balance team. Game Councillor is effectively appointed because like 2 dudes even touch the lua repo. DevOps precedent has basically been appointment but that's because there hasn't been a situation of multiple qualified candidates wanting to have the position. And so on and so forth.

For Player Councillor to operate in a similar fashion you'd need it to basically be like the trainers, TDs, and matchmaker team vote for their manager but the whole issue here is that these teams are quite fluid and low in barrier to entry. If I had a closed election like this, I'd have 4 dozen complaints about rigging the vote because I didn't let some dude that hadn't logged onto FAF for 3 years that had a trainer avatar in 2017 for a few months participate etc. Same thing with TDs. I already dealt with a ton of moaning because I would remove people as TDs if they failed to host a tournament within the last year, imagine that also carried the loss of some voter privilege.