Hi All,
Good to see us testing different methodologies for decision making.
Our charter encourages experimentation with deliberation and decision
thusly:
6. Organizational Methods - commitment to direct democracy
WDDM will be an exemplar for direct democracy. As much as possible,
decision making power will flow from direct vote of the membership.
And we will strive to test and implement cutting-edge methods to
enhance deliberation.
The 'range voting' method that Mirek has chosen (as election
administrator) for the board elections
is interesting. I don't know if it will work. It seems to me that a
few very low or very high votes might skew the results. But I'm sure
that
experience with the method will prove more helpful than discussion
alone. Similarly I'm unsure about the enitiative concept. The goal
(improving motions via open input) is attractive enough. But I'd like
to see how 'runaway' modifications are prevented. Delightfully, our
charter gives us room to try it.
Mark Antell
--------------------------
WDDM webmaster wrote:
Hi all!
Sorry for the further delay. It seemed simple to add range-voting
method to
our secret ballot system, it's was simple in principle, but it took me
several
days to make it working perfectly.
Range voting is promoted here: http://rangevoting.org/ . It's
supposed to be
the best method available (for the representative democracy anyway,
it's
promoters above claim that switching from plurality voting to range
voting in
ordinary elections would be an improvement of the same magnitude as
going in
the past from from the absolute monarchy to plurality RD).
So I thought that some promotion of this method at WDDM might also be
useful.
It may be an overkill for the WDDM Board election, but I had in mind
future
application for continuous tallying the views of our group on various
issues in
the course of the deliberations on them. One can add additional
candidates
(choices, answers to a question) during the course of deliberation,
others can
rate them on a fine scale from 0 to 99, so this would give an idea all
the time
what is most important to the group, and discussion could continue in
those
directions. ...
You can play with range voting in the new 'Demo Range Voting
Elections'
at http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/vote/ (third selection).
Range voting is supposed to do away with any strategic voting. One
can rate
all the candidates exactly as one really feels about them without the
fear that
it will help winning a candidate whom one really dislikes - no need to
choose
between the less evils.
=================================================================================
Back to WDDM BOARD ELECTIONS:
You'll find it again at: http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/vote/ (top
selection). Initially, four candidates announced earlier are listed
there.
Any voter can add additional candidates. Voting is done by rating all
or some
of the candidates on the scale from 0 (no approval, practically a vote
against)
to 99 (highest approval). One can have no opinion on some candidates -
that
will not effect their final score. Unlike voting 0 which decreases it.
We decided that this will be a hybrid vote, so whoever does not like
to vote
online, can still send in their votes by e-mail to this address again,
rating
each candidate the same way as above (0 to 99, or No opinion).
Additional
candidates can be also nominated and rated. These e-mail-in ballots
will be
added to the online results only after the closing date, except perhaps
for the
names of possible additional e-mailed candidates which can be added
into the
online system as they arrive so that online voters can also vote on
them. I'll
also send out the names of additional nominees from the online system
to the
mail-in voters before the closing of the ballot.
I put the closing date for this Elections 10 days from now, on May
16, 2007,
23:00 Eastern Time. If you think that that is not enough time, let me
know.
Happy voting,
Mirek
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