I decided to write this post when I accidentally got sucked into the rabbithole* of kokonutz's manifesto
... but as I read through page after page of the 2-year old discussion of the role and importance of TB, I never saw this point made anywhere:
How can a large number of members learn about TalkBoard, and learn how TalkBoard may impact their FT experience, so that they are actually interested in the election? Discussion of TalkBoard and the elections are restricted to forums not visited by most FTers.
I hope this story can now be used without the political fallout/implications that would have occurred had I aired it immediately after the election. There have of course been several threads in the MR Deals forum debating whether or not login should be required to see the deals. When TalkBoard elections were being held last year, several of the candidates had a view that would directly influence/impact that issue, and I found out that, in fact, several TB members had voted against the issue in the previous year. (I was pretty much unaware of this at the time it happened as I don't follow the politics here very much.)
But apparently there are rules about no discussion of the election in 'regular' threads. Members who tried to bump threads related to the issue and mention there was currently an election on that topic were scolded for campaigning, and IIRC, the thread was locked. This happens to be an issue I was very passionate about, so I PM'd a bunch of the posters on the thread that had expressed support for my views, and I was reprimanded/reported for that by a moderator. (I'm not debating or challenging the moderator actions in either case - I assume they were correctly enforcing whatever policies exist. The story just doesn't make sense without those facts.)
But where is it more appropriate to mention an election than in a thread where people are complaining and upset about an issue that is currently a hot topic in the campaign?
You want to have a TalkBoard to pretend to represent 'the people', but it's completely
verboten to inform 'the people' that there is a TalkBoard election going on where they can vote to change they things they have complained about.
The first step to making TB relevant to users is to be able to point out to users that there is a TB, and that the TB has purview over the issue they care about, and there is currently an election in which some candidates share their views. But there is literally no way to do that, as far as I could tell.
*Is the scope of TalkBoard campaigning a topic that is allowed to be discussed by TalkBoard? Or is TalkBoard campaigning a matter of moderator policy and enforcement that can't be discussed on TalkBoard? Is it Kafka-esque that I have to ask that question?