Some people don't want to get even as formal as a vote. Of those who do want a vote to get a firm grasp on "consensus", many do not want our decision making process to get as formal as a Supreme Court thread. Of those wo do want our decision making process to get as formal as a Supreme Court thread, instituting minimums under any name is still way too formal. Then bring out preferential ballots, and other mathy things *shakes fist at Gar* is likely to turn off even more folks.

For everybody feeling their heads spin at the math, and the, uh..."rush to bureaucratize" I'd just say...take a deep breath. Because I think we're just brainstorming options and implications now. I am pretty sure, that as Cindy notes, there is no will for a very complicated process or procedure. The people who are most interested in the questions of governance are hashing things out at a micro level because we're blah blah intensive. It is making me conscious of the implications for different voting methods, so not useless, but at the same time...

>I'd like to very gently (please ignore me if you'd like) suggest that we take a breath and let this vote come out before we get so far into detailed plans that may never come to pass. I'd also like to suggest (still gently) that after the vote results are final, we take a look at the list that Sophia created during the retreat at WXing. We have about 5 people now, getting deeper and deeper into true bureaucracy for a community that up until a week ago, wasn't doing all that much bitching about a very informal process. One of the things many Buffistas like is the fact that this board isn't so very formal.

...we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's see what we have after this vote. It may wind up that there's a strong desire not to even go to voting. Or there may be a strong desire to do nothing more than simple majority votes and then on only the most substantive issues.

The people that are most interested in talking about this on a theoretical and detailed level, I just want to alert you that you're inspiring a "this is too fucking complicated why bother" reaction rather than insight at this point.

I think it will discourage people from taking part.

If we're up to thirteen candidates on a single vote than I think we need to think about what we're doing. That would suggest to me that we've poorly defined the issue, or we're drawing distinctions without much effect. If we have up to four or five options then I don't think it'll be much of a problem.

OK - you know this stuff really is not that complex. I just didn't explain it well. Look you rank your choices, saying what is your favorite what is your second favorite and so on. If nothing wins a majority we figure out from the rankings who would have won a run-off, and if needed additional run-offs until some choice wins a majority. Simple and fair.

And we would not use except in cases which were both important and with more than two choices. In thread choices we would do something simple; if the "wrong" choice won, so what.

But if the "quorum" (after all that is the word on the ballot) wins, then we have to decide quorum size. In that case is the Australian ballot worse than a runoff? Remember, most of the issues we will have to settle are binary. Is this really that unreasonable in the cases that are not.

If you think about it, first past the post is complicated too. It is just a complexity we are familiar with.

Yeah, this is dumbfoundingly confusing. I actually invented the Bureaucracy thread (seriously -- look it up) and I can't deal with any of this. It's scary and too many percentages. Less math, better government!

But I'll drop it for now. Just so long as nothing is ruled out at this point. If we can agree that preference voting as means of determining the simple majority rule is not ruled out by voting for a simplemajority , I will be happy to shut up.

I haven't been following any of this successfully for ages! (Of course, I am Ms. Cold Medicine.)

Wrdoy dwory word.

I love this.

I also appreciate Maya's suggestion about minimum-yes-votes.

Or, if someone proposes a simple binary option, Simple Maj/Two-thirds deathmatch, and nobody objects, we can just make that choice and be done with it.

Okay I didn't understand most of this, but I'm all for the deathmatch choice.

The people that are most interested in talking about this on a theoretical and detailed level, I just want to alert you that you're inspiring a "this is too fucking complicated why bother" reaction rather than insight at this point.

I just want to reiterate this. the complexity will discourage people from voting. The simplicity will help us frame proposals that are simple. I follow every post here, so I am not so disconcerted by the heavily technical discussion going on right now, but if I jumped in and saw this, I would think we are crazy to do this.

I understand that Borda and Condorcet and Australian are "simple", but they don't seem it. They give me a headsche and they aren't transperent (and I took a whole course on hem at college1)

While our hearts are in the right place, I think the confusion of a) talking about voting as if it is a done deal and b) having really, really technical conversation is perhaps more detrimental to the proposition of voting and simplifying things.

The reasons I support voting are that it will be easier to have a time limited discussion and even if people are upset by an outcome, they can CLEARLY SEE that they were outnumbered. This is why I think we have to work very hard to keep every vote understandable and as free of bureacratize as possible AND to keep the results transparent to math-phobes.

Deathmatch good.

Gar, I don't think we have ruled out anything. Katie was just pointing out that people might feel the vote was confusing.