Re: changed charter, new elections proposal

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Hi James,

Let me try and be a bit more clear as to how I'm proposing we do this: so we
decide to have 11 board members.  So there's 11 open slots.

20 people nominate themselves to be on the board.

We send email to everyone with 20 names on them, and everyone can vote for no
more than 11 people.  No preferences, nothing fancy.  You get an e-mail with
20 names, and you reply and put an x next to as many as 11 names.

The script then just collects all the votes and the 11 people with the
highest number of votes get elected.

Optional: If people like my amendment to Jon and Dan's idea, the script would
spit out an election update every day during the 7 days of  the election.
That way you can see what the board might look like before you cast your
vote.  That might help us get a more balanced board.

Alternatively:
---------
People could just rank all 20 candidates, which yield some additional
information, but it also complicates things, and forces people to make fairly
arbitrary rankings (I wouldn't know how I'd rank Maciej and Havoc, for
example).

Also, I have a feeling that the script won't be perfect in parsing people's
responses, so when the script breaks, we'll do a manual tally.  I suspect
that this ranking system may be more prone to script-breaking and it will be
a major headache to manually tally results under this system for more than 10
people.

But do you think this is a much way of structuring it?

Bart

James Henstridge wrote:

> > - I propose that everyone be allowed to vote for up to 11 candidates.
> > So everyone gets to elect their dream-team.
>
> only 11?  Does this mean that preferential voting is out?  Are you voting
> for 11 candidates, or 11 candidates in order of preference?  What if I
> have a preference for a 12th or 13th person?
>
> > - Havoc will write a script to help tally the votes.  Votes would be
> > held by sending email to vote gnome org (or whatever).  Havoc would come
> > up with a ballot format that could be processed by his script.
>
> What voting system is this script going to use?  These sort of elections
> where multiple candidates are selected can be difficult to understand (I
> know that very few of my friends understand exactly how the australian
> senate voting system works exactly).  Depending on the voting system,
> people may have to vote differently to express the same opinion.