Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be: 1) Dariusz: 2028-556=1472 2) Maria: 2184-775=1409 3) Phoebe: 1995-714=1281 4) James: 1857-578=1279 5) Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
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
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Negative votes exist for a reason. Or, let's make voters choose between "support" and "support"?
Il 06/06/2015 19:15, Milos Rancic ha scritto:
Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be:
- Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
- Maria: 2184-775=1409
- Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
- James: 1857-578=1279
- Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
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
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I still think it was a big mistake (of the electcom? I don't remember, but /someone/ pushed it through without discussions) in the 2013 election to abolish the Schulze method. Am 06.06.2015 19:16 schrieb "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com:
Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be:
- Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
- Maria: 2184-775=1409
- Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
- James: 1857-578=1279
- Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
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
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
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
The Schulze method that was being used is the one that is specifically intended to give only one winner; probably most people don't know that Schulze also created a separate system that was intended to give multiple winners. It is a very confusing system and many people unintentionally gave support to candidates they did not believe should have a chance.
One of the things that really becomes obvious using the S/N/O system is the number of *non-votes* or neutral votes: almost all of the candidates had more neutral votes than support and oppose votes combined. The effect of not requiring voters to decide how to classify each candidate (in Schulze, to rank the candidate; in S/N/O, to support or oppose) has radically different effects in the two systems. In S/N/O, the neutral votes have no effect at all on the outcome. In the Schulze system, not ranking a candidate is the equivalent of an oppose vote; every candidate who is ranked (even if they are ranked at a level well below the number of candidates) is ranked higher than a candidate who is not ranked at all. This is counter-intuitive and gives no effective way for people to differentiate between candidates that they really really do not think should be on the board and candidates about whom they have not formulated an opinion, or even candidates about whom they are indifferent. It is a serious weakness in the Schulze system. Nonetheless, the S/N/O system has significant weaknesses as well, as others have pointed out.
There are other systems that allow only as many supports as there are seats open, which might be worth considering. There are systems that only allow support votes and no opposition. There are not very many systems, though, that are specifically designed to give multiple winners when one of the conditions is that they *not* be running on a shared ticket.
We did not have enough time in 2013 (nor, to be honest, the interest amongst Election Committee members) to do a thorough review of multiple-winner voting systems. That year, we had to develop all of the processes for electing FDC members and FDC ombuds, which was a lot of work. This year, the committee barely had enough time to do the tasks that were absolutely required just to make the election happen, and in order to incorporate the specific instructions of the board with respect to outreach, seeking of diverse candidates, and increasing voter participation (all of which proved very worthwhile), they didn't have time to fine-tune a lot of the processes that were already developed. I would have loved to see changes in the way that questions are handled, and a rethinking of the voting methodology, for example. But there simply was not time to come up with a well-considered *better* way.
So...yes, I agree with Milos and many others that a Standing Election Committee is needed to re-examine the way that Board candidates are elected, and to re-examine the entire framework on which the elections are based - indeed, I recommended it after the 2013 election.
I find it interesting that nobody seems all that worried about the FDC election (where 5 of 11 candidates got seats) or the FDC Ombud election (where both candidates came forward in the last 24 hours before nominations closed). These two elections suggest some pretty big underlying problems as well. Nobody seems all that upset that fewer than 10% of all the candidates for the 2015 elections were women - one of the lowest percentages ever - and that not a single woman was elected to any role for the first time in any election where more than one candidate was being elected. On the whole, despite having a fair number of candidates outside of the US and areas represented by large national chapters, not a single non-white, non-male candidate, not a single Asian, African or Latin American candidate was elected. We're pretty good at talking about diversity, but very poor at implementing it.
Risker/Anne
On 6 June 2015 at 13:55, MF-Warburg mfwarburg@googlemail.com wrote:
I still think it was a big mistake (of the electcom? I don't remember, but /someone/ pushed it through without discussions) in the 2013 election to abolish the Schulze method. Am 06.06.2015 19:16 schrieb "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com:
Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be:
- Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
- Maria: 2184-775=1409
- Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
- James: 1857-578=1279
- Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum <gregory.varnum@gmail.com
wrote:
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
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On 06.06.2015 20:30, Risker wrote:
I find it interesting that nobody seems all that worried about the FDC election (where 5 of 11 candidates got seats) or the FDC Ombud election (where both candidates came forward in the last 24 hours before nominations closed). These two elections suggest some pretty big underlying problems as well. Nobody seems all that upset that fewer than 10% of all the candidates for the 2015 elections were women - one of the lowest percentages ever - and that not a single woman was elected to any role for the first time in any election where more than one candidate was being elected. On the whole, despite having a fair number of candidates outside of the US and areas represented by large national chapters, not a single non-white, non-male candidate, not a single Asian, African or Latin American candidate was elected. We're pretty good at talking about diversity, but very poor at implementing it.
Risker/Anne
The election's discrepancies of FDC and Ombud can be justified. The two committees are much technical and require some specific experience.
But it's important to stress that, excluding the two women looking for a re-election, there were 0 new women within the candidatures.
Even there were new candidates for different areas, probably with a low wikimedian experience, but what is really important is that no women submitted a new candidature even white, global north living, English speaker.
Regards
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
1. One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community 2. Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups. 3. Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.
Thoughts?
Pine
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 8:58 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
- One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
- Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
- Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.
Thoughts?
That's interesting, though I'd have some additions: 1) Not continents, but global cultural areas (i.e. not South America, but Latin America; not Asia, but likely Mid East + North Africa, South Asia, East Asia...). 2) Three, if we add user groups? 3) +Jimmy :) But I'd also object on non-renewable terms. Stu and Bishakha for a long time and Jan-Bart for the most of the time were the main sources of stability inside of the Board.
At the other side, I am thinking that we should switch from electing the Board, to electing the Assembly, which would select the *Executive* Board (which should be paid). ~50 members of the Assembly wouldn't be that big financial pressure, even they would meet two times per year.(~3000 participants of Wikimania; few hundreds of Wikimedia Conference; and it's not likely that Assembly members would be too much different from those who participate in those two events).
That would definitely raise participation and empower trusted members of our community. In that case, we could make elaborate quotas, like "at least 40% of women", "at least 5% per region" etc. It's hard to do that with three elected members.
I think we'd be ready for that if not in 2017, then definitely in 2019/20.
On 6 June 2015 at 14:58, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
- One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
- Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
- Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.
Thoughts?
How many continents will get to have candidates? Six? Seven? Eight? There was some pretty significant discussion in the current election that Europe isn't really a unified continent, and that Eastern or Eastern/Central Europe shouldn't be considered the same thing as Western Europe. And I'm pretty sure we don't have anyone currently resident in Antarctica who would meet even minimal requirements for election and who would willingly be a candidate.
I've never really heard a good argument for the existence of the chapter seats, which are essentially community seats elected by representatives of less than 10% of the active community.
And I do not understand why appointed seats should not be renewable, although I agree that term limits should apply to all seats. These may be the only way to ensure some diversity.
Illario mentioned before that there was only one new woman candidate for any of these elected positions, and the only two women candidates for the board were the incumbents. The strong push for candidates outside of the "traditional" areas may play a role here. Several women I approached to consider candidacies said quite bluntly that the activities they were working on or were planning to work on were more likely to make a difference in the movement than having a seat on the board would have, and certainly would be making more difference than being on the FDC would have. I think there's a fair amount of truth in that.
Risker/Anne
On 6 June 2015 at 19:58, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
- One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
Continents have widely varying populations. Europe has a population of about 0.75 billion while Asia is over 2 billion
- Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
The problem is that this tends to favor pure political players. I'm not saying its a bad thing to have excellent networkers on the board but there are other factors that should matter.
I think this is dancing around the perceived problem. You can either have open, democratic, and fair elections with a result that represents the will of the electorate, or you can have a group of people who are diverse in terms of nationality, gender, ethnicity, etcetera. Not both. And I don't think that tinkering with the formula for election and board composition is really going to do anything to address that.
Seeing the candidates that stood, I think that the real problem is the lack of female candidates for us to elect. And that is a cultural problem, exacerbated by the fact that unfortunately Wikimedia projects can be quite a hostile place for women, and understandably many women don't want to make themselves targets for harassment. Once there is a more even number of men and women running, I think that this particular problem will take care of itself.
Cheers, Craig
On 7 June 2015 at 04:58, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
I'm happy with S/N/O and with the election winners, but concerned about the diversity of the Board. I wonder if rethinking the entire board structure is in order, for example we could have:
- One seat per continent, elected by the whole voting community
- Two affiliate seats chosen by all affiliates including user groups.
- Two appointed seats with non-renewable terms.
Thoughts?
Pine _______________________________________________ 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
I basically agree with the whole of Risker's post but want to expand in this bit:
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 7:30 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
There are not very many systems, though, that are specifically designed to give multiple winners when one of the conditions is that they *not* be running on a shared ticket.
One of them that is well-adapted to our circumstances is the Single Transferable Vote system.
As in Schulze, voters put candidates in order of preference. However, the STV system is designed to produce diversity of opinion among an election for several people (it was originally designed as a proportional system for public elections in circumstances where there weren't "party lists").
There are also a couple of systems which try to combine the theoretical advantages of Schulze with the practical advantages of STV and they should be looked at as well, but STV has the advantage that it is computationally simple (you can run an election with pen and paper, unlike Schulze or anything related to it; there are a number of software packages that perform counts for you; and it must be pretty easy to code as well...)
Regards,
Chris
The result could also be interpreted as a thundering success for the voting method being used.
We have now the last year and two seen major improvement in professionalism in WMF (thanks Lila) and the chapters and their boards (thanks local ECs and boards, FDC members, Katy and Winnifred). But the professionalism of the Board has not really improved correspondingly, and is in my view the weakest link in the movement just now. And the key is here of course the recruitment to the Board.
And while I have the highest respect for the members now leaving, and see them worthy of praise, I personally think we anyway need stronger candidates more experienced in running this type of business. And I actually see the new ones having stronger background to enabale the necessary improvement in professionalism. This by the way include a more more professional election process, including a (standing) Election Committe (that exists well before the five days that was given before having to get into operational mode that was the case this time ...).
And is it not perfect that the used algorithm enables a balancing of the benefit for the existing Boardmembers of being well known with a disappointment they do not live up to the high(er) exceptions (or need of changed profiles in Board)?
Anders
Milos Rancic skrev den 2015-06-06 19:15:
Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be:
- Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
- Maria: 2184-775=1409
- Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
- James: 1857-578=1279
- Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
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
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On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 8:26 PM, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:
The result could also be interpreted as a thundering success for the voting method being used.
Just to be clear: I think you (Election committee) did very good job. Inside of the stable circumstances, like they are now, It's very useful to use a voting system which would prefer new people. I just said that this system is likely to be harmful if used for the future elections.
On the long run, Schulze stability (basically, electing the mainstream) vs. this variant of approval by selection gives more weight on Schulze. But I am sure that the standing EC will find something more appropriate for the next elections.
I think also that it's valid idea that EC chooses voting system according to the needs of particular point of time. For example, this time it was about giving opportunity to the new candidates. Next time it could be more balanced. If you notice that Board is unstable (for example, small number of those with more than two years of experience), then Schulze again.
Milos Rancic skrev den 2015-06-06 21:00:
I think also that it's valid idea that EC chooses voting system according to the needs of particular point of time. For example, this time it was about giving opportunity to the new candidates. Next time it could be more balanced. If you notice that Board is unstable (for example, small number of those with more than two years of experience), then Schulze again.
A very good point!
Anders
Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted in most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none of them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people would vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result will be simple exactly the same as if there will be no "no" votes - in both methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is just because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental objections to vote "no". But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad ones) enough to vote "no" have much higher impact on the results than the others - which I think is not good by itslef.
By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only "yes" and "no", and how many voted "yes" for only one candidate and "no" for all others (the most impact for selected candidate).
2015-06-06 19:15 GMT+02:00 Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com:
Moving this discussion into a separate thread, to leave the main one for best wishes and similar :)
Before I start talking about the voting system itself, I have to say that, from my personal perspective, I wouldn't imagine better outcome: a Polish steward (my favorite Wikimedian group :) ), a Croat founder of Wikidata (whom I consider as a friend) and a very prominent English Wikipedian, with significant record of working with smaller languages (BTW, I didn't know that he's a candidate till I saw the results; I didn't vote, as I still don't think I am able to make informed decision; useful note: one year out of movement requires more than one year to be able to fully participate again).
When I read the results for the first time, I thought that it's about structural changes. However, it was not. Present Board members were just punished as present board members (some people will always object your work) with negative votes, as well as Sj was punished with lack of positive votes because of his laziness :P
The problem is obviously the voting system. And it's one more reason why standing committee should be created. With more time, they would know why it's perfect for stewards and why it isn't for any kind of democratic representatives (including English Wikipedia ArbCom; as far as I remember, this is exactly the method how en.wp ArbCom is elected).
Stewards have to be trusted all over the projects and 80% threshold follows that idea. However, stewards are not reelected, they have to show to that they are doing good job and there is the space for those who are doing important, but not visible job. Bottom line is that stewards themselves decide if somebody would stay a steward or not. (If there were objections from the community.) And stewards are doing that job perfectly.
It should be also noted that stewards are elected managers, not democratic representatives, which Board members and en.wp ArbCom members are.
This system is bad because of two main reasons: (1) it isn't suitable for electing democratic representatives; and (2) it's very vulnerable to abuse, which could easily create negative culture.
Applying this to the democratic elections consistently means one of two things: we want to have conformists in the Board or we want to change Board members every two years.
I hope the first is not our idea. The second could be, but two years in office is too short period of time for a Board member to do anything substantially. So, this method would be a valid one if the term of a Board member would be, let's say, four years.
The output of the elections is not democratic, as well. It's obvious that Maria got the most support and it's 5% more than the first one, as well as Phoebe had more support than the second one.
While I think that opposing votes are important, they shouldn't be *that* important. Successful candidate had to gather 3 supporting votes for every opposing one. If the supporting and opposing votes have the same weight, it would be more fair.
With the formula S-O, the results would be:
- Dariusz: 2028-556=1472
- Maria: 2184-775=1409
- Phoebe: 1995-714=1281
- James: 1857-578=1279
- Denny: 1628-544=1084
And the results would be much more according to the expressed will of the community: Dariusz is well respected steward and community has given him a lot of support, and as he is a new candidate he didn't do anything which would annoy a part of the community. Maria had significant opposition, but also the biggest number of supporters, which has to be acknowledged. Phoebe and James would have been very close, while Denny wouldn't reach support threshold.
If one opposing vote has weight of three supporting votes, this could easily change the strategy of the groups interested to see one of their candidates as Board members. Instead of "vote for", we'd get "vote against" attitude. That's not just abusive toward the system, but also creates negative atmosphere, where candidates and supporting groups could start looking into each other as enemies, not as fellow Wikimedians.
So, while the current voting system has given refreshing results, it would be bad to keep it as it's now. To be honest, I would avoid negative votes at all, as I am sure that even more fair system would be implemented, if it contains negative votes next time, we'll get much more negative votes than this time, with negative consequences for our culture.
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 2:16 PM, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
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
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On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted in most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none of them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people would vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result will be simple exactly the same as if there will be no "no" votes - in both methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is just because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental objections to vote "no". But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad ones) enough to vote "no" have much higher impact on the results than the others
- which I think is not good by itslef.
By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only "yes" and "no", and how many voted "yes" for only one candidate and "no" for all others (the most impact for selected candidate).
Based on the numbers, it's likely that the voting was dominantly like: "I want this candidate or two"; "I have no opinion about these candidates"; and "I really really wouldn't like to see this one or two as Board members".
I'd say that our democracy depends on such behavior of voters, as at the end we are getting good people in the Board, no matter who has been elected particularly. However, it could change and it could have dramatic consequences, as we are operating with small numbers.
What's more likely to be seen as the outcome of "rational voting" is to get one or few candidates with 50% less opposing votes and although it wouldn't need to be bad in the sense of particular candidates, it would make very negative consequences to the rest of the community.
First time such thing happens, next time we'd have bitter fight for every vote. And that would be the changing point: from friendly to competitive atmosphere. It would also mean that we'd get serious hidden lobby groups. (We have them now, but it's relaxed and much more about "it would be great if our candidate would pass", than about serious fights for own candidates.)
[For the record I'm running the vote dumps now that should allow some of that analysis to be done by those interested. No exact promises on timing because while I'll send it out today it will take some time to approve for anonymization etc.]
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted in most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none
of
them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people would vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result
will
be simple exactly the same as if there will be no "no" votes - in both methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is just because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental objections to vote "no". But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad ones) enough to vote "no" have much higher impact on the results than the
others
- which I think is not good by itslef.
By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only "yes" and "no", and how many voted "yes" for only one candidate and "no" for all others (the most impact for selected candidate).
Based on the numbers, it's likely that the voting was dominantly like: "I want this candidate or two"; "I have no opinion about these candidates"; and "I really really wouldn't like to see this one or two as Board members".
I'd say that our democracy depends on such behavior of voters, as at the end we are getting good people in the Board, no matter who has been elected particularly. However, it could change and it could have dramatic consequences, as we are operating with small numbers.
What's more likely to be seen as the outcome of "rational voting" is to get one or few candidates with 50% less opposing votes and although it wouldn't need to be bad in the sense of particular candidates, it would make very negative consequences to the rest of the community.
First time such thing happens, next time we'd have bitter fight for every vote. And that would be the changing point: from friendly to competitive atmosphere. It would also mean that we'd get serious hidden lobby groups. (We have them now, but it's relaxed and much more about "it would be great if our candidate would pass", than about serious fights for own candidates.)
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I agree that negative votes have possibly too much weight in the current system. But there is one other problem with what we have: people from some cultures may be much more reluctant to cast tactical negative votes. If this is so, because of cultural differences we privilege cultures more flex about expressing dissent. James Alexander has promised to look into raw data, as this effect would be observable. If it shows up, it is yet another argument to drop the current voting method.
best,
dj
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 10:48 PM, James Alexander jalexander@wikimedia.org wrote:
[For the record I'm running the vote dumps now that should allow some of that analysis to be done by those interested. No exact promises on timing because while I'll send it out today it will take some time to approve for anonymization etc.]
James Alexander Community Advocacy Wikimedia Foundation (415) 839-6885 x6716 @jamesofur
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:39 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 10:13 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polimerek@gmail.com wrote:
Well, the funny thing with current system is that if people had voted
in
most rational way - i.e. to maximize the impact of their votes - the results would have been negative for all candidates - as this year none
of
them got more than 50% of positive votes. But in fact if all people
would
vote in that way - negative votes would be negligible - as the result
will
be simple exactly the same as if there will be no "no" votes - in both methods of calculation :-) What makes negative votes so important is
just
because people are not voting in rational way as they have some mental objections to vote "no". But those brave ones (or smart ones or bad
ones)
enough to vote "no" have much higher impact on the results than the
others
- which I think is not good by itslef.
By the way would interesting to know how many voters voted only "yes"
and
"no", and how many voted "yes" for only one candidate and "no" for all others (the most impact for selected candidate).
Based on the numbers, it's likely that the voting was dominantly like: "I want this candidate or two"; "I have no opinion about these candidates"; and "I really really wouldn't like to see this one or two as Board members".
I'd say that our democracy depends on such behavior of voters, as at the end we are getting good people in the Board, no matter who has been elected particularly. However, it could change and it could have dramatic consequences, as we are operating with small numbers.
What's more likely to be seen as the outcome of "rational voting" is to get one or few candidates with 50% less opposing votes and although it wouldn't need to be bad in the sense of particular candidates, it would make very negative consequences to the rest of the community.
First time such thing happens, next time we'd have bitter fight for every vote. And that would be the changing point: from friendly to competitive atmosphere. It would also mean that we'd get serious hidden lobby groups. (We have them now, but it's relaxed and much more about "it would be great if our candidate would pass", than about serious fights for own candidates.)
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Regarding contents / geographic vs. cultural areas: I think either would make sense. One way of looking at cultural areas would be the ways that the affiliates spontaneously organized ourselves at WMCON, possibly with a few additions.
Regarding differing population sizes: yes, but there will be imperfections no matter how we arrange a system. Regardless, we can design a system that is better than the one we have now, and I hear no one in this thread saying that the current board structure should be maintained.
Regarding negative votes:
# We use S/N/O for many other kinds of votes, including FDC, steward, Arbitration Committee, and featured content votes. I have not heard disagreement with it until now, which suggests that generally there is consensus for this system.
# If the system was confusing, I would have expected people to ask questions on the vote talk page for FDC and Board elections. While there were other questions on the vote talk page, no one asked about the S/N/O system. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_elections_2015
# One of the best features of S/N/O is that it works to favor candidates who have consensus for them, i.e. have both a good quantity of supporters and have few people who oppose their election. If someone has many support votes and many oppose votes, this suggests that the person is relatively controversial, which probably makes them a less optimal choice for roles like FDC, Steward, Arbitration Committee, and WMF Board roles.
I'm open to hearing of better systems than S/N/O, but at this point I continue to support S/N/O, and judging by how many kinds of votes we have in the Wikimedia community with the S/N/O system, it appears that there is general consensus for this model.
Pine
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 9:02 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
# We use S/N/O for many other kinds of votes, including FDC, steward, Arbitration Committee, and featured content votes. I have not heard disagreement with it until now, which suggests that generally there is consensus for this system. ... # One of the best features of S/N/O is that it works to favor candidates who have consensus for them, i.e. have both a good quantity of supporters and have few people who oppose their election. If someone has many support votes and many oppose votes, this suggests that the person is relatively controversial, which probably makes them a less optimal choice for roles like FDC, Steward, Arbitration Committee, and WMF Board roles.
From my perspective, and I don't think it's unique, those elections
are quite different:
* FDC: Realistically, just people from chapters and thematic organizations are interested in this. And if I am a Board member of a chapter, my rational approach would be to approach other chapters and make a deal with them who should be elected. Basically, that population decides anyway. Besides the fact that a lot of us don't feel comfortable to make political decision for expert seats, while we don't have precise clue what we should require from the candidates. It's not the duty of *every* member of the community to be an expert in hiring grantmaking staff.
* English Wikipedia ArbCom: At some point of time I was very active on en.wp, but I was never interested in en.wp governance (not even to become an admin). I think that the majority of non-native English speakers have such approach to en.wp. On the other side, I would note that being a member of en.wp's ArbCom is highly stressful position and I don't think that there are many of long-term ArbCom members (in comparison to, let's say, WMF Board). I am sure that one of the most important reasons are negative votes, exactly. You can't do good job if you want to be reelected.
* Stewards are the third category and this system is actually perfect for their elections: both public and requiring 80% of support. Stewards are not going to reelections. Other stewards review their work, while openness of the group is guarantied by constant elections.
* Negative votes tend to make the whole atmosphere much more tense, stressful for both the community and Board members. Besides the reasons I (and others) have given into the previous emails.
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM, Milos Rancic millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On the other side, I would note that being a member of en.wp's ArbCom is highly stressful position and I don't think that there are many of long-term ArbCom members (in comparison to, let's say, WMF Board). I am sure that one of the most important reasons are negative votes, exactly. You can't do good job if you want to be reelected.
Newyorkbrad managed to serve for _eight years_, and most people seem to think he did a good job. It is true that most arbitrators don't serve for very long,[0] but this is mainly because they either resign or choose not to run again. The standard reasons are "it's too stressful" or "I'm too busy".
From what I remember, the usual panic around election time is that
there won't be enough candidates (of course, there always are).
There were elections for CheckUser and Oversight for a couple years, but ArbCom went back to just appointing people after there was an election in which only one person passed the vote threshold. CU/OS is more comparable to stewardship than to ArbCom, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/History#Former...
On Jun 7, 2015 9:31 PM, "Milos Rancic" millosh@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 9:02 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
# We use S/N/O for many other kinds of votes, including FDC, steward, Arbitration Committee, and featured content votes. I have not heard disagreement with it until now, which suggests that generally there is consensus for this system. ... # One of the best features of S/N/O is that it works to favor candidates who have consensus for them, i.e. have both a good quantity of
supporters
and have few people who oppose their election. If someone has many
support
votes and many oppose votes, this suggests that the person is relatively controversial, which probably makes them a less optimal choice for roles like FDC, Steward, Arbitration Committee, and WMF Board roles.
From my perspective, and I don't think it's unique, those elections are quite different:
- FDC: Realistically, just people from chapters and thematic
organizations are interested in this. And if I am a Board member of a chapter, my rational approach would be to approach other chapters and make a deal with them who should be elected. Basically, that population decides anyway. Besides the fact that a lot of us don't feel comfortable to make political decision for expert seats, while we don't have precise clue what we should require from the candidates. It's not the duty of *every* member of the community to be an expert in hiring grantmaking staff.
- English Wikipedia ArbCom: At some point of time I was very active on
en.wp, but I was never interested in en.wp governance (not even to become an admin). I think that the majority of non-native English speakers have such approach to en.wp. On the other side, I would note that being a member of en.wp's ArbCom is highly stressful position and I don't think that there are many of long-term ArbCom members (in comparison to, let's say, WMF Board). I am sure that one of the most important reasons are negative votes, exactly. You can't do good job if you want to be reelected.
- Stewards are the third category and this system is actually perfect
for their elections: both public and requiring 80% of support. Stewards are not going to reelections. Other stewards review their work, while openness of the group is guarantied by constant elections.
- Negative votes tend to make the whole atmosphere much more tense,
stressful for both the community and Board members. Besides the reasons I (and others) have given into the previous emails.
Just to put into perspective what risker said about neutral votes: it is technical because one needs to click something. There is no way to remove a radio button, and neutral was the default. I find therefore the naming confusing or the user interface.
But for the results I am happy. I fully agree with others already noting that controversial candidates are and imo should not be favoured. There must be a reason Maria last time was elected and got an impressive number of counter votes this time. It might be that denny really did awesome stuff in the last years and one did not hear a lot from Maria the last years. For phoebe it might have been a diversity vote, as there are already a lot of persons from the US in the board.
Diversity can imo best reached when more candidates can be elected. I think this would also work with experience in needed areas, not only continents, language groups or gender.
If we have quotas or whatever to get diversity we approach a FIFA system. Which would maybe work if we have organisations and elections for the diverse groups.
Rupert.
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