I have a lot of personal opinions on the method, questions process, etc. Many of them will be shared in the committee's post mortem (others I will be discarding as I now process the last several weeks).
Also, we are beginning to post some statistics that folks may find helpful: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015/Stats
We will be posting more on the blog next week about what all goes into running the elections, and I am open to feedback on what additional information we can share that would be helpful to the community. Our group made an early commitment to transparency, and I hope that has come across in our posting of major meeting minutes, posting of these stats, open dialogue on Meta and email, a post mortem from the committee, and the upcoming blog post.
Finally, I want to give a big thank you to my colleagues on the Elections Committee. I was, by the nature of my tasks, a bit more visible - but please know that everyone worked very hard, did a great job, and deserves equal gratitude. Thank you Adrian, Anders, Daniel, Katie, Mardetanha, Ruslan, Savh, and Trijnstel - as well as Risker, James, Alice, Philippe, Geoff, Stephen, Sylvia, Heather, Tim, and a few others I'm sure I'm forgetting.
-greg (User:Varnent)
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 6:19 AM, Chris Keating chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com wrote:
Congratulations to the new Board members - I am sure you will do a great job. And commiserations to those who will be leaving the Board - thank you for all your hard work over many years.
Also it is good to see a much higher turnout in this year's elections than in 2013 - well done to those involved :)
On the subject of voting systems, though...
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:
David Cuenca Tudela skrev den 2015-06-06 09:01:
However I must say that the results of this election are hilarious. The person with the most support votes doesn't win because of oppose votes
:D
Why hilarious? We had a full consensus in the election Committee to go
for S/N/O voting, it is a kind of standard procedure in the Wikimedia
world.
Many people looked at voting systems before the Wikimedia movement existed and virtually none of them settled on the system we ended up with. Perhaps this should tell us something!
To my mind the key problems with the present system are:
- Oppose votes have greater weight than support votes. In this case, Maria
would have needed 136 additional support votes to win, or 46 fewer oppose votes. In effect an Oppose vote was worth 2.96 times as much as a support vote for her. As a result, being non-opposed is much more important than being supported. The penalty for doing anything controversial is significant.
- There is nothing in the process to produce any diversity in the result.
Say that there was a 2/3 to 1/3 split in the electorate on some important issue. The right answer would surely be that you elect 2 people with one view and 1 with the other. However, in this voting system you would likely end up electing 3 people from the majority point of view. Because the Wikimedia movement is much more complex than this it is difficult to conclude that there was any particular issue like this that would have affected the result, but still, the point applies. The voting system builds in homogeneity not diversity.
Regards,
Chris _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe