As I write this the final hours for the 2011 PASS Board of Directors elections are ticking away. Before the results are announced to the candidates and general public I wanted to share how I thought this year's election cycle went.

Random Thoughts

• Whereas each of the last two elections had some contentious issue, this election cycle was controversy free. Kudos to the Election Review Committee for the changes that were made this year!
• Gut feel - the community at large was relatively quiet, or at least quieter than previous years. Not a bad thing, though. Maybe it's because every candidate's application was posted, because of the timing of the elections cycle (things ran later this year than usual), because there weren't any big controversies, or some combination thereof. Whatever it was, though, I don't believe there was voter apathy. The #passvotes hashtag received some good buzz on Twitter and several people did post blogs. It'll be interesting to see if the number of votes cast this year exceeds 2010.
• The NomCom's job was to vet the 6 candidates but with 3 seats open and an ideal target of 3 candidates per seat their role this year was more or less to make sure that none of the candidates were underqualified. That's not to downplay the job they did by any means - they volunteered a tremendous amount of their time and effort - but it will be very interesting (next year perhaps?) to see what happens when they have to make the really tough call at where to draw the line on who makes the slate and who doesn't.
• Many people made the comment that any combination of the 6 candidates would be a good addition to the Board. I agree - even if that means I'm not one of them.

Suggestions For Improvement

I have two suggestions for next year's elections:

• As with last year's election the NomCom produced a detailed score sheet that assessed each candidate on a variety of topics (see this link for an example of what last year's sheet looked like). These sheets were used to rank the candidates but unlike last year the detailed scores were not published nor made available to anyone outside of the NomCom. As a candidate I would like to have at least seen my own scores so I know what areas I can improve on.
• I'd like to see at least one live Q&A session with all the candidates that's moderated by PASS during the elections. If the elections run during the Summit and all the candidates are in attendance we could do something similar to the Board Q&A; otherwise we could leverage LiveMeeting and do it online.

Whether I'm elected or not, I've enjoyed the experience of running and appreciate the support I've received. The results will be announced publicly in the December 28 PASS Connector. THANK YOU to everyone who voted, and stay tuned to find out who your newest PASS Board members are!