Re: "Removed statement there is one vote per available seat" - was Re: W3C Process 2018

On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 12:45 PM, Glenn Adams <glenn@skynav.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Sep 29, 2017 at 10:35 AM, T.V Raman <raman@google.com> wrote:
>
>> I believe we have made voting far too complicated --- I dont believe
>> the 75% of the silent membership that never participates on these
>> lists or (sadly in most elections) is in any way likely to understand
>> these nuances.
>>
>> I beleive we'd make a far larger impact by going back to a simple
>> voting system, and instead spend the energy on increased participation.
>>
>
> +++1
>
>
>>
>> Florian Rivoal writes:
>>  >
>>  > > On Sep 29, 2017, at 7:34, Michael Champion <
>> michaelc.champion@gmail.com> wrote:
>>  > >
>>  > > Since only the Team has access to the raw vote data, this
>> discrepancy wasn’t noticed until recently.
>>  >
>>  > Good catch. I certainly wasn't aware of the discrepancy.
>>  >
>>  > > Does it matter?  Definitely, the results can be different.   There
>> is a GitHub discussion of this issue in which I go through a hypothetical
>> example  https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/60#issuecomment-
>> 323474691 <https://github.com/w3c/w3process/issues/60#issuecomment-
>> 323474691> to illustrate how the different approaches work.  The
>> currently implemented STV system would make it easier to elect TAG and AB
>> members ranked #1 by a substantial minority of the AC, the
>> one-vote-per-available-seat STV system would tend to elect people broadly
>> ranked in the top few spots.
>>  >
>>  > Reasoning about voting systems is hard.
>>  >
>>  > One thing I wonder is which one is more supportive of diverse
>> candidates. Diverse candidates may be people most voters don't know except
>> for a small number of fans, but they could also be people who don't quite
>> have the name recognition of the superstars, but still have a large number
>> of voters who are familiar and confortable with them even if they don't get
>> first spot on many people's list.
>>  >
>>  > I guess it might depend on whether "increase diversity" means "elect
>> candidates from all sorts of places, not just Goozillapplosoft" or means
>> "elect candidates with a broad range of viewpoints, including radical and
>> polarizing ones". It's not obvious too me how much overlap there is between
>> the two understandings, and what the exact effects of the two voting
>> methods are, especially once you take strategic voting into account.
>>  >
>>  > It would be interesting to see if the results on the live data of the
>> past elections for which we have data, even though this isn't perfect, as
>> voting strategies for either system could be different.
>>  >
>>  > —Florian
>> --
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>
(I am not our AC rep, and am not speaking for my org, just personally)

+1 to what Michael said that I doubt people understood this. I didn't and I
don't (again, personally) support this idea.   I do support some kind of
ranked/preferential voting system, if people are informed and actually
vote.. I have said this multiple times over the years, so --- basically +1
to what TV said: The much bigger 'problem' here (if we can agree there is
one) is that people don't.

-- 
Brian Kardell :: @briankardell