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

Hi Florian,

Yes it is hard to reason about voting systems, which is why I still haven’t made up my mind on this.  As far as I can tell, the currently implemented system (not the one the Process Document prescribes, the one that Process 2018 would describe if it doesn’t have the language about one vote per available seat) is more “supportive of diverse candidates” : If there are 5 open seats, if 21% of the voters rank somebody #1, that person gets elected no matter how the others rank him/her.  That’s a Good Thing if that person would do a good job for everyone but only a few know how great he/she is. That’s not such a good thing if the person is an extremist who appeals to only the 21% who ranked him/her #1.   And it’s probably not healthy for W3C if it leads to extremists on opposite sides getting elected.

The old system (and the one-open-seat-at-a-time STV system implied by Process 2017) favors mainstream candidates that get broad support.  That probably means “Goozillapplosoft” people (such as myself  ;-) ) continue to get elected, if only because our  corporate interests are so broad we can’t afford to focus on only one issue or take positions that are antithetical to big chunks of our stakeholders, so we have to steer for the mainstream.   But in an organization that runs on consensus rather than voting, that’s arguably a good thing.

So, I see the proposed Process 2018 system as increasing the likelihood of electing both great candidates known only to a few, and extreme candidates supported by only a few.  Which we get in practice depends on who gets nominated.  The old (or Process 2017 as written) system tends to favor those known to be minimally acceptable to a majority; whether that maintains stability or prevents needed radical change is equally hard to predict.




> On Sep 28, 2017, at 5:02 PM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Sep 29, 2017, at 7:34, Michael Champion <michaelc.champion@gmail.com <mailto: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