Joel,
I was thinking that the eligible voters for *only* the first election would be those who posted in the last three months. Among this group, only those who actually do vote will be eligible to vote in the next election.
My thinking is that this group will be relatively self-selection - they have visited the website at least once and considered the application and have gone so far as to post something. They've also revisited the site and spent the time to consider the candidates and vote.
However, I like your idea of having anyone that signs up by a certain date to be eligible for voting. Among this group, only those who vote are eligible for the next vote. The reason is that there are certainly people in the community or who use the OACS who do not post or have CVS committer rights. If they choose to sign up and to consider the candidate, I think that is enough.
To grow this list afterwards I like Carl's idea of having some kind of bonus system. Perhaps something like amazon's "X number of people found this useful" or some kind of elementary rating system.
This could further be a rather nice addition to the data mining process - such as filters for things like "find all 5+ posts that deal with new portals".
Alas, I suppose that would involve a great deal more hacking work, though...
talli
