Re: Voting again…

Bassetti, Ann wrote:
> Not sure where you have heard such complaints, Charles (and I don't doubt that you have) -- but I don't recall them.  Nor have I had any great flood of such emails.  Regardless, let's just agree what is or is not appropriate regarding election campaigning and proceed.
> 
> I am far more bothered by endless emails about voting systems .... 
> 

And yet another one :)

> ------About voting system ---------------------
> 
> While I am certainly in favor of a fair voting system, over the years I have read endless emails and sat through hours of discussion on this topic.  Multiple solutions have been proposed; the answer is not clear.  Perhaps as David Singer wrote, it's not clear which problem we seek to solve.

The problem we're trying to solve is quite clear to me but it seems that
ACs split in two groups: the ones who are bothered by this issue and the
ones who aren't.

The current voting system will give a strong premium to companiesˆH
candidates who represent a slate of interest. I once believed Chaals
detailed this with extensive details, but the recurrence of this "what
are we trying to solve" question makes me doubtful about this.

I believe that the W3C, as a global multi-stake organization *shouldn't*
have an AB (or a TAG FWIW) with 80% of the members being browser vendors
and/or major trans-national corporations. The result of the last AB
ballot is significant with respect to this, and I'm afraid this one will
see the 5 opened seats go to the same slate as the one 2 years ago.

If we were in the car industry that would be a similar situation to an
AB where would only be represented GM, VAG and Toyota. Hardly diverse.

The credibility and influence of such an AB would be questionable, to
say the least, and I strongly advocate for an AB which represents the
diversity of the AC reps, be it in term of companies size, area of
expertise... and even geography (Chaals is the only rep of a non-US
company in the 4 mid-term seats so depending on the result of this
ballot we might have 8 out of 9 seats representing US companies), or
gender (we had 2 women in the previous AB and depending on this one we
might have as low as zero).


Not all of these problems will be solved by changing the voting system,
but at least we might minimize the impact of strategic voting and
protect "small candidates" against the perverse effect of the current
voting system.

Regards
JC

Received on Monday, 5 May 2014 16:34:28 UTC