I've got to take Emmett to school. I'll check back later.

I'm perfectly capable of understanding the mathematics of why Australian balloting more accurately represents the preferences of the populace. However, I think it is overkill for resolving friendly disputes among an educated population over matters of NO IMPORT WHATSOEVER.

Exactly!

And Betsy, are we only going to use this for matters of no import whatsoever?

That's not been my impression.

What matters of import are there? This is neither the nation of Australia nor the city of Cambridge. It's a posting board, a community consisting of about 200 - 300 regular posters. We're not going to war, we don't have taxes. Our biggest question is going to be, "Should there be a thread for such and such a subject?"

But this is the exact problem! The 5 or 10 people who were around for one set of a couple of hours were coming to a consensus, but then a different 5 or 10 people were around for a different set of a couple of hours, and they didn't agree. This is exactly where we got into trouble -- a bullshit "consensus" of people who were reading the Bureaucracy thread at noon EST (or whatever).

When I was fiddling with the posting statistics last night, I ran the stats for this thread. Since we started this discussion after coming back from WX, there have been a bit over 1500 posts here. Of those, about a thousand of them are split up among only 14 people. Two thirds of the discussion has been among 14 people. That really isn't much more than your 5 or 10 people.

The thing is, I don't think it makes a bit of difference whether we vote or do consensus or preferences or whatever. We voted to hold the F2F in LA, and I still felt sort of railroaded by the way that went. Someone is always going to be disappointed with the outcome. I just happened to think that the simpler the better, because in the cosmic scheme of things, what we do here just doesn't matter a whole lot.

edited for typos

When I was fiddling with the posting statistics last night, I ran the stats for this thread. Since we started this discussion after coming back from WX, there have been a bit ove 1500 posts here. Of those, about a thousand of them are split up among only 14 people. Two thirds of the discussion has been among 14 people. That really isn't much more than your 5 or 10 people.

Thanks, DX.

I'd kiss you for posting this, but I've got morning mouth.

I like that we've always been able to say, "This is making me uncomfortable" and have people respect that. I don't like conflict. I especially don't like conflict here. I'm so upset at the turn things have taken that I don't think I can even articulate it. But this has been one of my valuable refuges from the real world, and I feel like I'm starting to lose that. That's why I like being able to table things that make people uncomfortable. Maybe that's naive of me. But I could always be naive here, and I liked it, and now I feel like I'm getting attacked for that.

I don't think it makes a bit of difference whether we vote or do consensus or preferences or whatever.

90% of the votors thought that there would be matters important enough to be voted upon. That wasn't 5 or 10 or 14. It was 120. Given that, we need a method to count those votes.

Can we please drop this for a couple of days?

When I was fiddling with the posting statistics last night, I ran the stats for this thread. Since we started this discussion after coming back from WX, there have been a bit over 1500 posts here. Of those, about a thousand of them are split up among only 14 people. Two thirds of the discussion has been among 14 people.

It's interesting to have my impression as a skimmer backed up by the actual numbers.

This is also all getting very meta. "Should we vote about whether or not to vote on 'is voting the correct process?' "

I don't mind people talking, in fact I like that the Buffistas talk about everything, but we're approaching the point where someone will be creating forum_wank, in the style of fandom_wank, just for us. The spiral can be a very pretty shape, but if you follow it too far you go crazy.

And that's hyperbole, but the point needs making.

Edit: yes, Jon. With the resting for a few days. Let's have that.

One more thing, before I shut the heck up.

It looks like there's weight being attached to the decision that "hey, voting, why not?", but in my case, at least, it wasn't a mandate. I wasn't thinking, "Oh, damn! We need to vote. Things will be bad if we don't vote!", I was thinking "ah, sure, why not. Maybe it will speed things up, take some of the discussion levels down."

Assuming that we voted because we had any massively serious opinion about it? Probably not a safe assumption to start out with.

It's fourteen people who've been doing a lot of the policy gabbing. That 120 of us showed up and pushed a button DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT'S THAT IMPORTANT TO US. It just means we voted. That's ALL you can read from it.

And we voted after reading constant reposts of the get out the vote messages. Would 120 Buffistas have pushed the button if there hadn't been a lot of encouragement to do so, or would 106 of us not noticed or bothered? Who knows.

But I really, really, really, in the grand tradition of feeling REALLY UNCOMFORTABLE, don't like the implication that voting meant there was a mandate.

I wouldn't have voted for it if I'd known there was that assumption.

I found the discussion here to be heavy, boring, and mind-numbing. And it was the same 14 people talking around in circles, reinventing the wheel a hundred times over, and I'm sorry I ever brought up voting.

It seemed so damned simple, and turned into an ocean of red tape and a 300 pound thesaurus of words that all meant, "take this fucking poll."

I found myself wanting to pull the plug on folks' internet connections. I voted, and had no idea what I was voting on, or what half the words in the vote meant.

And the entire purpose of the poll was to find a way to make decision making quicker and less painful.

Instead, making a decision about decision making turned into the hundred years war and I don't know what the hell happened. I avoided this thread for about 400 posts, because three hundred of the posts all said the same thing, in increasingly bigger words.

And what the hell is a quorum?

And now I'm frustrated with Cindy because I said that I'd write up a clear example but instead of waiting she wrote two long posts that I stopped reading halfway through because this -- "In this hypothetical, nobody's first choice got eliminated." -- tells me that she still doesn't get how it works.

Reason 1 I didn't shut up is because of the earlier post (I think by you, Jon) that said you'd thought "we'd" reached consensus to use the preferential method, at least for the ballot on the voting minimums.

I didn't want you to get that mistaken impression again.

Reason 2 I didn't shut up is because you gave a simplistic example for a complex ballot. We're not always going to have 3 choices, when we need the preferential system. We're going to have 5 or 6 sometimes because we are Buffistas.

Reason 3 I didn't shut up is because I have time this morning, and then probably not again.

Reason 4 I didn't shut up is because after I posted the one you stopped reading, I realized that I didn't take into account that you would just take the two highest of all 6 options, and so posted a second example, where just exactly that happened.

Reason 5 I didn't shut up is because I think this is getting railroaded through, when we could have an easy vote: most votes vs. preferential - yet when that was proposed by Denise last night, it was given little to no consideration, and that's exactly what makes me feel like it's being railroaded in.

Sorry I frustrated you. You frustrated me too, maybe that'll make you less frustrated?

you'd thought "we'd" reached consensus

I apologise for that.

you gave a simplistic example for a complex ballot.

I said I'd write up a better one.

so posted a second example, where just exactly that happened.

Nope. You still don't understand how it works.

I think this is getting railroaded through

I said a couple of times that I was in favor of a vote.

maybe that'll make you less frustrated?

A little bit. ;)

t edit And, seriously, if you want to discuss thtis further, I'm happy to do so via email. Let's not clog this thread.