Re: steering committee vs foundation

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 11 Jul 2000, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Bart Decrem <bart@eazel.com> writes:
> > today's steering committee.  The Steering Committee would be elected by
> > all the members of the Gnome community as a slate.  The slate would be
> > proposed by the outgoing steering committee but any member could propose
> > an alternative slate.  All slates that have at least 5 signatories would
> > be on the election ballot.  
> 
> One nitpick: there's a potential problem with splitting up votes, for
> example say you have two slates that are the same except for one
> person, and another entirely different slate, and each gets 1/3 of the
> vote; probably 66% of the voters would prefer one of the first two
> slates, instead of the totally different slate, but their vote was split.

That sort of situation can be handled by preferential voting like what is
used in Australia (and I think UK).  It basically selects the least hated
candidate rather than the most popular, which doesn't disadvantage similar
slates.  In the case you mentioned, if one of the first two slates had the
least votes, those people's preferences would go to the other slate
(provided that was their second preference).

James.

-- 
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/