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From: woods@ncar.ucar.edu (Greg Woods)
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: These new voting schemes
Message-ID: <4806@ncar.ucar.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 89 17:13:15 GMT
References: <4771@ncar.ucar.edu> <15249.253f3716@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <37123@looking.on.ca>
Reply-To: woods@handies.UCAR.EDU (Greg Woods)
Organization: Scientific Computing Division/NCAR, Boulder CO
Lines: 29

In article <37123@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>All of the proposals share another major fault: complexity.
>Complexity breeds flaming.  It's hard to manage, sure to result in
>misinterpretation, and increases bureaucracy.
>
>I firmly maintain the guidelines have to be made shorter, not longer.

   Brad and I have very different visions of what the net is and should be,
so I frequently find myself on opposite sides of debates from him. However
this time I think he has hit the nail right on the head. The more complicated
the voting procedure is, the more flames over petty procedural issues we will
have. Better to save our energies for flaming over something worth flaming
about! :-)
  Some of the counter-proposals in this thread are a little better, because
they do address the verification issue. However, now the problem is that
the vote results must be posted in a very specific format. This complicates
the procedure quite a bit. Instead of flames over the group name, we now will
get flames over the format of the voting results. I for one do not consider
that to be an improvement.
  We have to keep it SIMPLE. That's why I like either the NO vote threshhold
(again, simple and easy to verify) or having a name czar (or better, a small
group of name czars just to prevent one person with an axe to grind from
making a big issue out of a single case).
  I think that simplicity and verifiability are the most important things we
need in any new voting scheme. Flexibility of expression on the part of the
voters is nice, but not as important as keeping it simple and making it
easily verifiable.

--Greg