As this is supposed to be a debate with other candidates, I must say that I couldn't have said it better than Shareholder did. I agree with Shareholders views on this matter.
Originally Posted by Shareholder
Issues before the FT Board should be posted on in the Board forum several weeks in advance of their being discussed by the Board. This would allow members at large to offer their views, and those sitting on the Board, to get a sense of the range of opinion present. This does not necessarily mean the Board member's mind will be changed, but s/he should be more informed by reading this range of opinion. As with any "legislature" or "parliament" members are elected from the general population to present their own views in debate, along with those of their constituents. In the case of this Board, we would be elected to sit as ourselves, in effect a focus group randomly selected by election to reflect the overall consensus of opinion that exists on FT. Any legislator will want to know what constituents believe, but sitting as an independent, must vote his or her own view. That view, however, should be an informed one, and have been weighed on the basis of evidence and arguments made in the course of arriving at it.
The true way to determine what the membership wants is to ask. The only challenge with this is that I honestly don't believe that the majority of our 80,000 members are active and I don't believe that the majority of them even bother reading the TalkBoard forum. Looking at the number of views that a lot of these threads have had after almost 3 days of debates, I don't even know if a lot of members are even reading these - I'm sure half the views are the candidates viewing what the other candidates have to say. I believe that the TB should have member input and leave threads opened in the TB forum for a select period of time - or determine a period of time that they will be voting on an issue - they should let the members post all of their thoughts on those particular threads. However, they should also recognize that NOT all of FlyerTalk is represented by the input on the particular threads given the fact that there are almost 80K users (not sure the active amounts) and rarely do the TB threads go over a few thousand views. In the past year, out of the approximate 123 threads posted in TB, only about 24 of them have peaked 1000 views - out of those, only 6 have been viewed almost 2K times or more. I think that posting in the TB forum about upcoming votes, as Shareholder suggested, is an excellent idea - but I do want to caution all (and this includes all current & future TalkBoard members - even if I don't elected, the people that do should please try to bear this in mind) that I don't believe the input in the TB forum is necessarily represenative of the general membership. As we would be elected by the general membership (and only a few thousand voted last year if I recall correctly?), we have to make sure that we listen to what they say - but we also have to place ourselves in the shoes of the newbies who are to intimidated to post on FT - or the new folks that just discovered the forum. We are being elected by our membership & our peers - they are voting for us because they feel that we will best represent them. We need to keep true to that & make sure our votes are not being cast in what we believe to best for the future of FlyerTalk.