Voting system for elections

[Jimmy Kaplowitz]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2016 at 02:29:27PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> I therefore invite the Board candidates to say right now whether they
> would support a change for the voting system to STV.

I'd want to understand the implications of the switch as applied to SPI better
than I currently do, but I'm not in theory opposed to it. I do like the idea of
prioritizing people everyone can live with over everyone's ideal candidate, but
I also like the idea of including more directors outside of SPI's dominant
groups (and indeed I ranked some ahead of myself in my vote). Whatever works
toward those goals might be worth switching to.

I also appreciate the option of giving incomplete rankings where I just say
something like "I prefer X to Y but haven't had a chance to look at the other
platforms so don't want to comment" - however, in practice, I've never actually
wanted to vote this way, so it might not be an important thing except as a
theoretical possibility. I do think it's a good idea to allow equal
preferences, like Debian does. However, neither system allows specifying all
possible combinations of preferences, so it's one of the many user experience
vs expressiveness tradeoffs that always arises in these contexts.

Since I think SPI has more urgent problems for the new board to primarily focus
on, the drive for presenting the issue to the board would need to come from
someone like Ian who feels strongly about it, with context presented outside of
an election cycle where it can be considered properly. It's a completely
reasonable thing to consider over the next year if that happens.

- Jimmy Kaplowitz
jimmy at debian.org / jimmy at spi-inc.org

> 
> Thanks,
> Ian.
> 
> -- 
> Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.
> 
> If I emailed you from an address @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk, that is
> a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
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