Discussion on voting systems

[Leo Franchi]

On 17 Jan 2009, at 14:30, Leo Franchi wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The transition team has been discussing schemes for how to allocate  
> voting power amongst the body of voters.
>
> We are bringing this out for further discussion, mostly because us 4  
> have not coalesced on a single decision.
>
> The two options are as follows:
>
> 1) 1-vote per person
> 2) 1-vote + bonus per person.



Ok, now for my personal thoughts:

I strongly believe we should go for #1.

Some thoughts:

A question is if someone who has been working on Amarok for 3 years  
has "more" vision than someone who has been working on Amarok for 2.  
Does that extra year impart an extra 1/5th of a person's judgement?

**
1) The potential loss-of-anonymity in voting, because of the added  
complexity of matching each vote to a user-specific bonus.  
Theoretically one could write a voting system that automatically  
generates tokens (like the e.V) and matches them up with user-unique  
bonuses etc. However, this is significant amount of boring work, which  
means i doubt it will be done.

On the other hand, anonymity is an important feature of the vote. I  
wouldn't accept the result of a vote otherwise. So this is a /major/  
problem.
**

2) When do you quantify involvement beginning if a user becomes a  
contributor gradually?
3) When do you quantify involvement if a a contributor (non-coder)  
starts attending events, doing some promotion, writing some notes?
4) Who decides when to a certain person "officially" begins  
contributing? if the voters do, who decides the initial voters points?
5) The need for a continual re-calculation of each member's voting  
bonus (huge pain)
6) The nightmare of actually administering the vote system itself.

cheers,
leo

---
Leo Franchi				(650) 704 3680
Tufts University 2010

lfranchi at kde.org
leonardo.franchi at tufts.edu