Re: Is strategic voting a problem? - was RE: Don't disclose election results

On 2014-06-06 08:30, Michael Champion (MS OPEN TECH) wrote:
>> I think that strategic voting by at least 10-20% of the electorate is a
>> fact; what I *don't* know is whether it really makes a difference:
> I don't have strong feelings either way, but i'm thinking that if someone feels strongly enough about a candidate to throw all the other votes away in order to vote for that candidate, that's fine.  It could help increase diversity and representativeness by allowing people strongly enough aligned for geographic or philosophical reasons that they will throw their other votes away get a representative elected.
>
>   If someone wants to have it both ways to vote strategically AND use all their votes (Chaals has been frank that he's often in this position), I see that as a tradeoff people just have to make : Do I maximize the impact of my one vote, or do I maximize the impact of my collective votes? Life is full of these dilemmas...
>
> Again, I'd like to see us explore with real experiments whether an alternative scheme would actually change the outcome of elections,  and  be understandable enough to AC reps so that we don't decrease turnout.
>
> BUT  I still think the much worse problem is that we have qualified and committed people who wish to contribute to the AB/TAG but aren't elected because we are forced to select only 5 of them each year.   Nothing I've seen in these threads indicates that there are more than 20-30 people in the consortium who know/care enough about what either group does and have the employer support to spend time on it.  I'm just not convinced that there would have been a downside to having all 12 of the people who ran for the AB this year be seated, and letting them self-select who stays depending on their actual contributions.  Take away the fun of the competition and the supposed prestige of winning, we'll be left with the people who really want to spend their time working to improve how W3C runs and what it says about the architecture of the Web.

Like Michael, I'd prefer that it not be so small.  It's not surprising 
the 4 big browser vendors are on it - they play a fairly significant 
role in W3C - that leaves 5 other seats.  If there is concern the AB 
would be too large, limit it to 16 (or 20) with AC members able to 
nominate 1 person.  Replace the whole AB each year. If there are more 
than 16 nominated, then have an election.  Require active participation 
and regular meeting attendance or people are removed from the AB (e.g. 
can't vote if missed last meeting or aren't taking assignments).

I agree with Michael - if it weren't this small, prestigious elected 
group, there may not be that many people who would volunteer to be on 
it.   It's a lot of necessary travel and a lot of work for getting ready 
for AC meetings for me.  I've never been tempted.

I'd also split the advisory role from the process document maintenance 
role (editing the process document) and make process maintenance a 
subcommittee of the AC where any AC member could join at any time, with 
the work done mostly on this list.  That's the only place the AB could 
actually hold up something from being considered by the full AC 
(maybe).  There's no reason the advisory role of the AB and process doc 
maintenance should be the same group.

>
> ________________________________________
> From: Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org>
> Sent: Friday, June 6, 2014 12:38 AM
> To: David Singer; public-w3process@w3.org
> Cc: Robin Berjon
> Subject: Re: Don't disclose election results
>
> On 05/06/2014 22:24 , David Singer wrote:
>> On Jun 4, 2014, at 12:48 , Robin Berjon <robin@w3.org> wrote:
>>> As for strategic voting, only about half of AC reps vote for all
>>> slots. 20-25% vote for just one. (The rest distributes in between.)
>>> So there is no doubt that it is going on.
>> Really?  I can quite easily imagine there are AC Reps who only knew
>> some of the candidates, and by the time they excluded ones they knew
>> and didn’t like, found they had to accept a few so as to vote.  At
>> least, that’s how I imagine I got elected.  It might not be
>> strategic, merely caution.
> What makes me think it's strategic is the shape of the curve. Strategic
> voting is characterised by voting for just one candidate. Voting only
> for people you know, out of caution, should spread relatively evenly
> across knowing 1, 2, 3, etc. people. But things look more like:
>
> 1: 25
> 2: 4
> 3: 4
> 4: 15
> 5: 50
>
> We have two AC reps on the record stating they vote strategically (at
> least in elections in which they run): Chaals and Henry Thompson. It's
> something that was already discussed when I was an AC rep (and that's
> starting to be a while ago…). In a previous election we also know for a
> fact (because his email blast went to a few people it shouldn't have
> gone to) that at least one candidate asked his voters to vote
> strategically (and many did, though that wasn't enough).
>
> I think that strategic voting by at least 10-20% of the electorate is a
> fact; what I *don't* know is whether it really makes a difference: if
> voters spread it out evenly and the numbers are low, it can quite
> possibly cancel itself out.
>
> --
> Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon
>
>

Received on Friday, 6 June 2014 22:38:57 UTC