Jimmy-
Without drawing any conclusions for future
decisionmaking, I'll just
point out that one of the negative side-effects of voting that has
been alleged is that voting encourages partisanship rather than
co-operation.
To avoid this, we had plenty of time for open discussion. Many users took
the opportunity to comment on the submitted logos, and many refinements
were made on that basis. This was before any votes were made (obviously,
the earlier a logo was submitted, the more it could have benefited from
this).
What was missing was a good overview of the pros and cons of each logo.
This has technical reasons -- with the pages already very big and over 130
submissions, discussions had to be relegated to relatively hidden talk
pages. I'm not very happy with this, because I believe in the principle of
*informed* democracy. Voting is pointless and quickly becomes a kind of
formalized, emotion-based flamewar if people are not aware of the
arguments for and against each option. I am always open to suggestions for
how to point people to these arguments without being obtrusive.
The transition from voting to consensus finding is gradual and vice versa.
But as can be easily mathematically demonstrated, as the number and
diversity of options and the number and diversity of voters grow, real
consensus quickly becomes impossible to achieve. Even with just 2 or 3
very good logos, you will end up with "partisanship". What compromise can
you make between a puzzle sphere and an abstract circle-type logo?
Combining ideas from both sounds good in theory but in practice is the
kind of forced solution that never works.
In the logo contest as it took place, there were consensus finding phases,
voting phases, and now there's a consensus finding phase again (to
optimize the logo). I think this is the way to go on controversial matters
such as this one.
While my favorite didn't win (it didn't even make the list of finalists),
I think the overall logo process worked pretty well. We managed to get
from over 130 submissions down to 11 and now to 1 in about 2 months, with
hundreds of voters from all across the world, with two different voting
systems, open discussion throughout the whole process, and all that
without any additional software support whatsoever, and without
significant cheating. We had translations of contest rules, voting
instructions and ballots in many languages. We had a user contributed
counting script and live-updates of the results. The finalists almost all
complied with the contest rules and were generally agreed to be all of
high artistic quality or at least conceptually good. The amount of
strategic voting was negligible. The winning logo was the leader in both
rounds, under different voting systems. Last but not least, we made a
decision as planned (well, almost).
Regards,
Erik