Re: Political policymaking
Bruce (reordered):
> It's an awful lot of mechanism you are proposing, and I strongly doubt
> it is all that necessary.
See my comments in my other message regarding apparent complexity.
The arrangements are intended to be streamlined and fair in practice,
rather than simple to present.
> I'd like to hear from other developers on that.
We'll hear from the other developers when they vote in the leadership
election, and again when the formal rules are put through the
procedure itself.
It seems paradoxical to me that you, whose election platform involves
retaining the leader's fiat power in its current form, feel that it
would be necessary to `hear from the other developers' regarding my
proposals.
How do you propose to find out what they want ?
By having them post `me too' here on debian-devel ? Surely not.
By holding an unofficial `opinion poll' ? See my response to Philip.
By holding a formal vote ? But that's what I plan to do !
> [Ian Jackson:]
> > If amendments interact with each other then the different plausible
> > alternatives are put to the vote together using Single Transferrable
> > Vote.
>
> This is about where I start falling asleep.
That's just a cheap shot; however I'll answer the point about STV
behind it.
I'm terribly sorry you have trouble coping with STV; I know that you
Americans have generally only two candidates to choose from and I'm
sure this makes voting easier.
In the rest of the world, however, STV is quite common, both in
official governmental elections and in other organisations. Almost
every student society in Britain's universities (from the smallest
with memberships counted on one hand to the largest with tens of
thousands of members) run their elections for officers using STV. The
USENET UK group creation process, widely held up as a model with
statements like "why isn't the big-8 run like this" uses STV for both
officer appointments and CFV details like group names.
STV is really easy for voters to understand, and it does the Right
Thing in all but contrived pathological cases of interest only to
mathematicians. I'll admit that it's not the easiest system for
counting votes - but that's what we have computers for, right ?
In contrast voting `yes/no' on final proposals gives all the power to
the person controlling the text of the proposal, and voting `yes/no'
on interacting amendments is cumbersome and suffers from bizarre
effects.
Ian.
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