This is what my understanding of the status of our decision making….

I thought we had decided it was neither possible nor desirable to anticipate every possible type of decision we could ever have to make and create a contingency plan for that situation.

I thought it was “case by case” with a decision to be made soon concerning how to handle votes that have more than a Yes/No option. Preferential vs. Run Off with the likelihood that it will end up being case by case?

Also, I didn’t hear anybody saying status quo was a dirty word, just one of the options in any given decision.

I thought there was 4 questions to be decided.

ITEM 1: FORMAL DISCUSSION THREAD – a Y/N decision

ITEM 2: CLOSE DISCUSSION – a Y/N decision

ITEM 3: VOTER TURNOUT – Structure of vote to be decided

ITEM 4: SECONDS - Structure of vote to be decided

It is quite possible that I have missed something else we are deciding.

xpost with Jon which links to what I thought we were deciding

I would like to change item 4 to reflect what I said above:

ITEM 4: SECONDS
a. Should there be a minimum number of Buffistas to "second" a proposal before it can be brought to a formal discussion and vote?

b. How many Buffistas should it take to bring a proposal to a formal discussion and vote? a. 3 b. 5 c. 10 d. some other number?

(also, these numbers came out of my ass.

Structure of vote to be decided

t broken record I've seen a consensus to go with a preferential ballot this one time and see how it works out. t /broken record

Sophia - Why not just make "0" one of the options? Doesn't that do the same thing? The mathematician in me says "yes".

Preferential works for me Jon.

The reason not to make zero one of the options is to avoid the issue of "status quo" having a better/worse change depending upon whether or not we say there has to be a true majority one of the 3 numbers.

depending upon whether or not we say there has to be a true majority one of the 3 numbers.

But we've already said there needs to be a true majority and that we'd decide this one question (<edit>well, two actually t /edit ) via a preferential ballot.

Think about it - If a majority want no secondses, then "0" will win with a majority right away. If a majority do want secondses, then they will vote for one of the other choices and "0" will be eliminated in one of the rounds of preferential balloting. It does the same thing.

Correct me if I am wrong-- if we weren't going with preferential balloting, if we were going with "If there is no true majority, then we will table the issue" it would matter?

So anyway, yes, I see that with the preferential. I just didn't know that everyone agreed to try this time when I posted the change.

Can I ask the board if anybody is against trying out preferential voting for any reason other than "in principle." I think all the previous posts have been either:

1) try out preferential voting or 2) no, it's not fair in principle to try out something that needs to be voted on first.

Personally, I find the debating to be engaging as an exercise, but as a practical matter, it's extremely tiring and annoying. For weeks this thread has been dancing around how to vote, how to count votes, who needs to vote, my vote's for monkey etc. and I know big picture everybody thinks we'll have some Great System in place after this is done, but we're losing the forest for the trees. One of the Davids said Keep it Simple and we've gone way past that.

So let's try out the preferential voting which, if I understand it correctly, works the same as an initial vote and a runoff without the necessity of voting twice.

if we weren't going with preferential balloting, if we were going with "If there is no true majority, then we will table the issue" it would matter?

Yes, you are correct. Sorry for the confusion.

I just didn't know that everyone agreed to try this time when I posted the change.

I'm not trying to foist anything on anyone. Really. But I thought we had consensus.

t edit and what Wolfram said.