someone needs to volunteer to count the votes.

Still not caught up, but I'd love to be able to help with that.

The fact that my timezone and weekend-schedule are different than the majority may be either helpful or damaging to this, I'm not sure which. [Edit: x-post with Jesse, whose offer it is]

Oh yeah, and we do have to decide how we'll agree on what's to be voted on yes/no.

Oh-- yes/no votes are the best.

I was thinking that we should maybe do a modified Robert's Rules?

If there is enough (how do we define enough) discussion of something in Bureacracy, we can create a thread for it in "So Mote it Be". Then we can discuss. When it time for discussion is over, we would have to post the actual question to be voted on. I think we can be flexible and not have it be EXACTLY the same as the question we started with.

For example:

I could propose that we start talking about non-whitefonted spoilers in Buffy and Angel.

Some people support me.

We start talking about it and through the course of discussion, agree that this is silly, but we would like to be able to cross-pollinate between Buffy and Angel threads for things we have already aired.

So the vote might be: White-font stuff from the other show in the opposite thread for 1 week.

Which isn't the original question, but is something that came up.

I do wonder if requiring emails might limit voting to people who have stronger opinions -- it seems slightly more cumbersome to address and type an email than it is to check your choice on a poll. But I think a trial run would probably let us see if that's the case, and an automated email form like the one at [link] would also alleviate that problem.

You could include two e-mail links in the proposal, one for yay, and one for nay, and set up the links so they automatically fill in the subject line. All you have to do then is click on the proper link and hit send.

I do wonder if requiring emails might limit voting to people who have stronger opinions -- it seems slightly more cumbersome to address and type an email than it is to check your choice on a poll.

Part of me thinks if someone can't be arsed to send an email, then that someone doesn't care enough to vote.

I love the idea of email voting. Tallying will suck, but if the vote is in thesubject line, it gets easier.

If there's a list of members by email addy, I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to set up a spreadsheet with a column for "yes" and a column for "no".

I do agree that going to the trouble of sending in an email would help people to take the process more seriously.

And why not adding a poll module to the current website? That would allow automated vote tallying, and it would also ensure that each person could vote only one time. The poll would only appear on the page if you are logged in, and once you have voted, the system would register: "user nº 654 has already voted on this poll", and wouldn't show it to you the next time.

The negative side of this idea: more coding work for ita (and Lord knows that she has already worked enough here during the weekend).

Sophia, I think we have to agree on the idea of a Supreme Court and debate thread first.

Oh, I missed that, Jesse. In that case, I think it's a great idea.

We already have a voting form that sends the results via email -- last year's Foamies ballot. I don't know how much of a server load it would be to alter it to a simple yes/no radio button form with a subject line. (And how we can make this the least amount of work for ita, of course.)

I think the admins can get a report of addresses, but only for people with their addresses in their profile, maybe? DX? ita?

I love Allyson's Supreme Court thread proposal.

I do too. And I'd like to see it a bit more moderated/stomped than the other threads, if not as much so as Press and Beep Me -- it should be open to all opinions, obviously, but I worry a bit about the temptation to turn it into a bureaucracy clone as people say "oh, and while we're on the subject of whuffie, I wanted to bring up email lists..." Or something else utterly unrelated.

We are, after all, a chatty people.