[maemo-community] [Council] Voting system progress?

[From: Ryan Abel]

On Jan 18, 2009, at 12:20 PM, Andrew Flegg wrote:

> Dave wrote:
>>
>> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>>
>>> Some kind of range voting seemed to get a lot of traction on ITT  
>>> from
>>> some election experts; but was dependent on being written up in a  
>>> way
>>> which makes sense in plain English.
>>
>> Honestly, I'm not a fan of range voting. What's wrong with  
>> preferential
>> voting, which is easier for voters? Single Transerrable Vote,  
>> Schultze,
>> and Condorcet are all available as counting methods for these - I  
>> prefer
>> the easy-to-understand STV over the others, and we have software that
>> does STV counts.
>
> Agreed. I was clumsy with my terms. s/range/better/. Sorry for the  
> confusion.
>
> Ryan had a task to raise the issue, and there seemed to be consensus  
> on ITT. His conclusions are here:
>
>    https://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Define_voting_procedure_for_Community_Council_elections
>
> There seem to be two proposals there. Ryan, are you imagining  
> putting both to the vote, was there a consensus on -community & ITT?  
> Having two "change" options: does that mean people will complain  
> about splitting votes if "none of these" wins; or similar? (What we  
> *do* if none of these wins, I'm not sure. Probably, continue the  
> next election under the current rules and hope the next council take  
> it as a sign to pick up the task again?)

Well, there was only one proposal the last time I checked. Benson was  
the one that carried this to the end, so it might be worthwhile to  
bring him in on it.

*CCing*

>> I don't think you should get more specific than that on saying  
>> exactly
>> what system will be used for exactly this reason - we'll end up  
>> having
>> annual referenda to change what should be implementation details.
>
> I would hope that a better set of rules would mean that changes  
> wouldn't be quite so frequent.

Yes, I'd hope that we can establish a good enough set of rules that  
change would be infrequent indeed.

> As for the karma requirements, I'd suggest that if we want to change  
> them, that's a separate referendum (avoiding the issues Debian's  
> just faced with the lenny-release voting). It could be, that with  
> ITT now counting towards it, the numbers aren't so contentious.
>
> How many ITT posts alone would someone require to meet the 25 point  
> limit? (Such a member would hopefully be atypical)


I forget the exact math used to calculate the itT posts karma, but  
lcuk has exactly enough at 629.[1][2]


[1]http://maemo.org/profile/view/lcuk/
[2]http://www.internettablettalk.com/forums/member.php?u=15861

--
Ryan Abel
Maemo Community Council chair