Hi Cor,
On Wed, 2010-11-24 at 17:07 +0100, Cor Nouws wrote:
> > So - I havn't got to looking at this in detail yet; but I strongly
> > recommend a 'fair' voting scheme - such as used by GNOME - ie. STV. This
>
> Can you pls tell what STV is?
Single Transferable Vote; cf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_Single_Transferable_Votes
it is a fair way of electing people, such that:
> > makes it very difficult for a contributor with 51% of the votes to get
> > 100% of the seats [ which 1st past the post assures ].
this cannot happen.
> And what has a fair voting scheme to do with 100% each year or 50%
> each year?
I tried to explain that. Basically, the problem is one of quantisation;
let me provide a few examples. The fewer people up for election, the
less fair the election is.
With STV - if we have 100 people for election, and 51% of the electors
choose a Foo-company candidate as first choice (and no-one else) - then
we end up with 51 (or perhaps 52) Foo-company guys.
However - if we have 1 person for election, and 51% of the electors
choose a Foo company candidate. We get a a single Foo-company elected
guy - right ?
So - in the limit, as we move towards smaller and smaller pools of
people we are voting for, the rounding errors get worse - and the
'fairness' (where by fairness, I mean matching the distributed intent of
the voters to who is actually elected) decreases.
This is essentially an artifact of not being able to elect fractional
people ;-) So lets take two lots of 4 vs. one lot of 8 people being
elected. Lets fix the vote both times: one lot 'A' have 66% of the first
choice vote: the other 'B' the remaining 34%
to vote for elected
4 3 A, 1 B
4 3 A, 1 B
8 5 A, 3 B
Soo ... in the two lots of 4 case, we get one fewer non-'A' person. At
this point someone of course will fault my mathmatics in this particular
instance ;-) suffice it to say, that (by considering the limits) this
kind of rounding problem has to exist.
As such, the bigger the number of candidates to elect, the more fair
the representation ultimately.
> > Then, there is the admin overhead of elections, and the problems of
> > getting people to vote more regularly.
>
> Both voting each year for 100% of the seats, or each year for 50% of
> the seats, result in one election per year. With less counting in the
> letter case ;-)
Ok - but if you only elect half each year, then we have to have two
year terms, which seems -incredibly- long in a fast moving software
industry.
> Maybe you can further explain what you think to gain with 100% of the
> seats each year?
And perhaps you can help me understand what we loose ? :-) Particularly
when the foundation is in its inception, and growing fast, it seems
crazy to me to have two year terms.
Regards,
Michael.
--
michael.me...@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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