The CSM election season is in full swing, with 53 candidates making campaign posts in the CSM campaign section of the EVE Online forums. How do I know? Because I've made 53 pages for CSM Wire, which you can access by clicking on the CSM Wire button underneath the title of the blog. But even that is understating the number of potential candidates. In an interview done with Cap Stable, CCP Leeloo stated that approximately 100 players had submitted applications to run in the CSM 10 election that begins on 25 February.
One hundred candidates? Probably not. Apparently, about a third of the applicants are not submitting scans of their passports. That will knock the number down to maybe 70. That's still a lot, though.
I think that the schedule that CCP Leeloo laid out really will play havoc with the plans of the "EVE media". I think a lot of people didn't want to waste time on joke candidates so didn't want to begin their coverage until after the official list came out. But with CCP Leeloo announcing the list is coming out on 23 February, that just leaves two days for them to do analysis. Sure, the voting takes place from 25 February to 10 March, but I expect the majority of the voting to take place on the first day. That means those candidates who made an effort to publicize themselves early will have a huge advantage. Unless, of course, a candidate is relying on a bloc in which people just hand out a link to use to vote the straight party line. In that case, no publicity is needed.
I should add one other fact. The campaign thread is full of English speaking candidates, with a few candidates from France and Germany sprinkled in. Where are the Russians? Probably on their own forums organizing themselves. I expect that in CSM 10, unlike the current body, CCP Leeloo will not be the only Russian in the CSM Skype channels.
We still have two weeks to go until the election starts and I'm already tired. As one of the talking heads appearing on the Cap Stable CSM X analysis shows, I've listened to all the interviews the Cap Stable crew have published. I think the total right now is 24, along with the interview with CCP Leeloo and CCP Falcon and 4 analysis shows. That doesn't include an additional 15 interviews they have either planned or are in the process of editing. For those candidates who have not scheduled an interview yet, sorry. The Cap Stable crew stopped taking interview requests last Friday. For those who think that's not fair, Cap Stable put out their first call for candidates to request an interview on 1 December and published the first interview with Borat Guereen on 29 December. If a candidate wasn't organized enough to put in a request before that, well, maybe next year.
Oh, and my hats off to the Cap Stable crew. I'll probably give them a shout out once or twice more before the whole process concludes. They, along with Marc Scaurus on Just For Crits, have produced the most information in the form of interviews that we have today.
Notice I didn't concentrate on the candidates themselves? You can get some of my views by listening to the analysis shows, but I'm so caught up in the process of pumping out information, even in the limited role I play, that I haven't taken time to really evaluate all the candidates. Perhaps that's a post I can make on the 24th.
