I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but I’ll see what we can check safely.
Re: the number of voters: I’m not sure. I wish more people had voted, but it’s generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; I’d include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, there’ll be more natural interest as this will be a more established “thing”).
Some reasons I expect people didn’t vote: people thought they were ~unqualified (I heard this worry and tried to push back on it here, but could probably do better in the future), they just weren’t interested (e.g. because they didn’t think this is relevant, or their favorite projects weren’t candidates) or didn’t have time, they just didn’t hear about the election, or they meant to do it and never got around to it.
I should also flag that a lot of monthly active Forum users are ~weekly users, I think, and I expect that those are significantly less likely to vote. You can see this chart from the Forum survey we ran a while back (I’m hoping to share a writeup on it soon), which sort of illustrates this (it’s a bit iffy because (1) the Forum survey will overrepresent more frequent users — although that arguably boosts my point, and (2) this question had an issue where people who use the Forum ~3 times a month don’t really have an obvious answer to give, but oh well):
We (Online Team) had some very casual internal forecasts on how many voters we’d get. I had initially (late November) put 50% for getting to 400 voters (most other people on the team were lower), then went higher as we got closer to that goal, and lower again later when voting slowed down. (We also had forecasts for 200 and 100; I had started with 80% and 90% there.)
I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but I’ll see what we can check safely.
Re: the number of voters: I’m not sure. I wish more people had voted, but it’s generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; I’d include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, there’ll be more natural interest as this will be a more established “thing”).
Some reasons I expect people didn’t vote: people thought they were ~unqualified (I heard this worry and tried to push back on it here, but could probably do better in the future), they just weren’t interested (e.g. because they didn’t think this is relevant, or their favorite projects weren’t candidates) or didn’t have time, they just didn’t hear about the election, or they meant to do it and never got around to it.
I should also flag that a lot of monthly active Forum users are ~weekly users, I think, and I expect that those are significantly less likely to vote. You can see this chart from the Forum survey we ran a while back (I’m hoping to share a writeup on it soon), which sort of illustrates this (it’s a bit iffy because (1) the Forum survey will overrepresent more frequent users — although that arguably boosts my point, and (2) this question had an issue where people who use the Forum ~3 times a month don’t really have an obvious answer to give, but oh well):
We (Online Team) had some very casual internal forecasts on how many voters we’d get. I had initially (late November) put 50% for getting to 400 voters (most other people on the team were lower), then went higher as we got closer to that goal, and lower again later when voting slowed down. (We also had forecasts for 200 and 100; I had started with 80% and 90% there.)