RE: Disclosing election results -- a voice of caution

Background information about me:  For the first time since 1999, I was not in this election.  I am American, hence familiar with one-vote-per-person.  I always vote.  I am quite outgoing and social, and not easily embarrassed. I like data. I value openness.

Given all of that:  If I had been in this election and the votes were made public, there are many scenarios I would find embarrassing.  Such as: if I was not elected by a wide margin; or, if I was barely elected; or, if I got very few votes at all; or, etc.  Any scenario that would indicate I'm 'not liked' by the group, would be embarrassing.  Further, I can imagine my management would pay attention to that data, and add it to my grade.

I suggest to all of you who are pushing hard on this, that you should consider people's feelings; consider cultural values other than your own; consider people who are quieter than you; consider people's jobs; and so on.  While there may be value in honing a better voting system (about which you already know I am skeptical), I would not want that value to be at the expense of the human 'costs' described above.

Much of the tenor of this voting 'push' makes me want to withdraw, not participate. If *I* feel that, I can only imagine others may feel the same.

For these reasons, if data is released, I strongly urge it be anonymized.

  -- Ann

Ann Bassetti
The Boeing Company
mobile:  +1.206.218.8039
email:  ann.bassetti@boeing.com


From: Brian Kardell [mailto:bkardell@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2014 12:27 PM
To: Daniel Glazman
Cc: Charles McCathie Nevile; L. David Baron; public-w3process@w3.org
Subject: Re: Disclosing election results (was Re: Result Re: Call for Consensus - "Use 'Schulze STV' for voting")



On Mon, Jun 2, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Daniel Glazman <daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com<mailto:daniel.glazman@disruptive-innovations.com>> wrote:
On 02/06/2014 21:06, Charles McCathie Nevile wrote:

> I'd be happy to have the pattern data, but not the candidate names - i.e. anonymize them so we can't figure out who romped in, who scraped in, and who
> was beaten out by a single vote - or only got 1.
Then I disagree. Publishing anonymized data is not useful to people
not drastically involved in W3C Process. I suggest then W3M shares
*all* election data with the AB, in full confidentiality. I don't
even know if it's already the case today or not, and that says
something about the opaqueness of our electoral system...

The AC would get, as I said earlier, number of votes globally and
per candidate and that would be enough IMHO.

(please note that even if the votes are ballots, the results are
 counted per person)

</Daniel>



I assume that the actual system stores 'ballot' records, I'd like to propose that those are exported anonymously - it is possible to glean slightly more data that way and certainly no more difficult for a reasonably intelligent person to create a 'count' for each candidate even in a simple csv which doesn't provide that directly.  I'm reasonably sure that within an hour or so of release, someone will re-post with counts if not provided.

Let's not overcomplicate things, just keep it simple :)



--
Brian Kardell :: @briankardell :: hitchjs.com<http://hitchjs.com/>