"Elections" are coming up very soon!

As most of you are already aware, the "elections" to the GNU Public Dictatorship's Board of Dictators are coming up next month.  The deadline for applications to be considered is Saturday, November 8, 2014 at midnight UTC.  Due to some technical difficulties that will be expounded upon in future posts we have not been able to post about this in this forum, but, lest you complain about the short notice let us remind you that this information has been available at your local GPD County Offices for several months, and had you been a more active participant in world affairs you would have known about this earlier.

As a quick reminder, the "elections" to the Board of Dictators are not your typical democratic elections.  Instead they combine the best of democracy, the open-source movement, and the management practices that high-performing corporations and dictatorships employ and that universities use for admissions.  The first step is the application, which is about as democratic as it can get.  Anyone is welcome to submit an application, and there are no fees to process the application.  The next step is a thorough review of the applications.  The purpose of this review is to separate the "serious" applicants from those who are applying for the wrong reasons.  This is not, however, a thorough background check; it is more like a checksum or a consistency check on the application.  We don't verify that everything you say in your application is true and that you, the applicant, is who you say you are.  We simply verify that the application taken as a whole makes sense and appears to be complete.  Once the serious applicants are identified, the claims made in those applications are evaluated in depth.  During this evaluation the applicants are notified that they are being seriously considered for membership in the Board of Dictators, and various "tasks" are assigned to them and their performance evaluated.  These two steps are probably the third and fourth steps of the process, but they are so intertwined that it's hard to say which is the third and which is the fourth.  The fifth step, should it be necessary, is to take any applicants who have performed adequately on their "tasks" and whose claims are awesome enough to warrant it and to discuss them in a special formal meeting of the Board of Dictators.  If a qualified applicant is found and all members of the Board of Dictators agree that the applicant is a good match for the GPD, the applicant is made a provisional member of the Board of Dictators.  If they continue to perform adequately, they will be made full members of the Board of Dictators at some future time.

As you can all see, this process is clearly better than a simple "first past the post" election system, where voters are often asked to choose between terrible candidates but are not given the choice to say "none of the above."  At the GPD we are nothing if not dedicated to excellence!

Application materials are available here (note that they are the 2012 forms, which is okay as no applicants were "elected" during that cycle):

Version	Word	PDF
US	US2983-2012M	US2983-2012M
International	W2983-2012J	W2983-2012J