[maemo-community] Election process referendum

[From: Andrew Flegg]

On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 4:12 PM, Dave Neary <dneary at maemo.org> wrote:
>
> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>> What about a referndum with four options, then:
>>
>>   1) No change; the current process is fine.
>>   2) A single-transferrable vote system.
>>   3) A reweighted range voting system.
>>   4) None of the above.
>
> I'd like to re-propose my initial proposition:
> 1) No change.
> 2) Codify preferential vote, without saying what specific voting or
> counting system will be used.

I'm still not convinced about giving the outgoing council so much
control, and don't want to have these debates *every* 6 months as to
what the current council should instigate for the next election.

So would suggest:

  1) No change; the current process ("first-five-past-the-post") is fine.
  2) A single-transferrable vote system. (Wording TBD)
  3) A reweighted range voting system. (Wording TBD)
  4) Giving the outgoing council the decision before each election. (Wording
     TBD).
  5) None of the above.

> The constitution should be, IMHO, a framework document, not operating
> instructions. Let's just specify a preferential voting system (which, by
> my reading, is possible within the current council guidelines), and let
> the council decide what to do in practice, after consultation.

To clarify, your reading of "The 5 nominees with the most votes are
elected" allows "most" and "votes" to be a total number of votes
counted by an arbitrarily-different system, rather than the highest
number of ballots cast?

What do other people think? Certainly not the intention, but it seems
- as a community - the most vocal (at least) don't mind suspending the
constitution when it befits (e.g. at the last election).

> Graham, as I understand it, the requirement of 25 karma to vote and 100
> karma or more to be candidates. The 25 karma requirement was relaxed for
> the first election, and several changes have been made to the karma
> measurement since then - ITt chats have been added, thumbs downs don't
> affect the karma of blog authors, wiki and bugzilla karma measurements
> have improved. The only reason I can think of that someone who is part
> of the maemo community would not now have 25 karma would be if they
> refused to create a maemo.org account. Otherwise, I think that karma is
> a lot betternow than 4 months ago.

Agreed. There are over 600 people with a karma of 25 or over having
had a quick look, but I spotted a few ITT usernames in there without
any count. I assume this is because they've not linked in ITT with
their maemo username yet. I'll look to advertising the linkage feature
on ITT this afternoon to better ensure people have the karma they
deserve.

I certainly *wouldn't* be happy if - at the last minute - the karma
requirement was dropped again. There's been plenty of time for people
to garner 25 karma points; to raise the issue etc. The proximity of
time someone raises an issue to a deadline is, admittedly,
understandable; but it dramatically reduces their ability to convince
me.

I also strongly disagree with those who say that karma shouldn't be
used for this (ignoring Tim's valid point that, really, the Council
doesn't have that much power), if it's not for rating someone's
participation in the community, what *is* it for? One of the things
mentioned when it was originally introduced was the prospect of karma
contributing to future device programmes - discounted hardware is
something much more concrete and attractive (assuming a council who
isn't widely populated by trolls and fools)

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
Maemo Community Council member