[maemo-community] Belated survey results

[From: Dave Neary]

Hi all,

The survey for the special characters on your keyboard finished last
week. After the election, looking at the votes, there were some
particularities which made generating useful results a little tricky:

* '(' got by far the most votes, and ')' came 8th or 9th on first
preferences - but got by far the most 2nd preferences. It was clear many
people voted '(' and ')' 1 and 2 in that order
* Some characters got a large number of first preference votes, but
almost no follow-on preferences (Euro, pound and pipe)
* There is no election - so deciding how many seats to allocate for a
transferable vote was nonsensical at worst, useless at best.

So - exceptionally, for the survey, I decided to use the Borda count.
This gives a good approximation of the order of preference people have.

Here's how it works: With 14 candidates, a number 1 preference is worth
13 points, a number 2 is worth 12 points, and so on - a number 14 or no
vote at all are both worth 0. By adding the number of points across all
ballots, we get a good idea of who appeared higher on the preferences.

Without further ado, here are the results:

http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=8

In order of preference:

Char  Score
'('    13673
')'    12807
'&'    10602
'='    10025
'_'     8824
'$'     8604
'<'     8358
'>'     8335
'|'     8267
'%'     7683
'\'     6658
'~'     6375
'€'     4648
'£'     2165

The results need to be taken with a pinch of salt - and perhaps examined
more closely. There was no residency information which might have shown
how important the pound sign is to UK residents, or the euro sign to
(other) EU residents.

You can download the votes and play with them yourself at
http://maemo.org/vote/blt.php?election_id=8 and read about reproducing
the results at
http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team/Generating_election_results

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary at maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh at jabber.org