.NET Foundation Elections Closing Soon! Here's the FAQ to help you cast your vote.

Our first ever open board member elections close on March 28 at 12 PM Pacific time! We have a good problem: over 40 candidates competing for 6 open board seats. Here's the information you need to get your vote in before the deadline.

The Top 3 Things You Need To Know

1. Voting is open to all .NET Foundation Members.

If you're not a .NET Foundation Member yet, you can apply here.

Membership is open to anyone who has contributed to the .NET open source community. That includes code contributions to any .NET Foundation project, but it also includes speaking, blogging, organizing events and meetups, and writing docs. If in doubt, apply!

If you have applied and are haven't heard back, or want to check on status, contact us at contact at dotnetfoundation dot org. The vast majority of disqualified applications just had name, e-mail, and GitHub username with no links or statement - if that's you, e-mail us with more information on how you contribute to the .NET community.

2. Your ballot was delivered via e-mail.

Members have all been sent an e-mail with a voting link. New members are being sent a separate voting link after acceptance. The e-mail will have the subject line ".NET Foundation Board of Directors – 2019". If you're a member and don't see that e-mail, check your spam, then contact us at contact at dotnetfoundation dot org.

3. Use the voting resources to pick a great team.

It's very important that you approach this with the view of picking a team. We highly recommend that you pick a diverse group that represents the whole community. A really effective board will represent gender, racial, geographic, age, and experiential diversity. We are extremely fortunate to have a great selection of candidates that can work together and bring all of those different viewpoints!

This will take some work on your part, though - you'll need to get to know the candidates. Here are some resources:

• The best way is to read their statements.
• To go a little deeper, take a listen to the audio interviews recorded over the past week. Many are linked to directly from their statements, and you can find the rest in Spencer's SoundCloud and Andrew's SoundCloud collections.
• You can also directly interact with the candidates by asking them questions or chatting with them on our election Gitter chat.

More Details and FAQ:

1. The election uses Single Transferable Vote (Scottish rules). There are 45 candidates (!) and you can rank as many as you want. The order matters. For more details, see the results of our mock election. I'm really impressed with OpaVote's efforts to graphically explain how the STV rules are applied:

   

2. As you can see from the above mock election results, the ballots are available for download (anonymized, of course). That will allow anyone to audit and analyze the votes, while preserving voter confidentiality.

3. Here are the current voting stats. I don't have access to the results until the election ends on Thursday, March 28, 12 PM Pacific time, and I think that's a good thing.

   

4. The deadline to declare as a candidate in the election has passed (Mar 21 12 PM Pacific time). If you'd wanted to apply and missed the deadline, the good news is that elections run every year, so you'll have another chance soon!
5. The rules prohibit more than two employees from any company from occupying a board seat, and we have two Microsoft employee candidates (in addition to the Microsoft appointed board seat member, Beth Massi). That means that if both are elected, we'll disqualify the one who has the least votes and recount the results. The voting system has provisions for this kind of thing.
6. Candidates are allowed to, and encouraged to, vote.
7. We're interested in how we can improve this election process next year. Feel free to e-mail, log issues on the election site, or chat with us in the election Gitter.
8. Thanks to the community for chipping in to help with these elections! Special thanks to Spencer Schneidenbach and Andrew Hoefling for getting so many interviews done so quickly, and to Sean Killeen and Khalid Abuhakmeh for their help with the election website.