electing multiple people

Josip Rodin <joy DeleteThis @entuzijast.net> writes:
> On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 04:48:20PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I think this runs the same risk as the original US Vice Presidential
>> election system. If you elect the runner-up as part of the same slate
>> as the winner, you end up with pathological results in a divisive
>> election with two or more opposing slates. Basically, you end up
>> electing the leaders of each slate and calling them the winning group,
>> resulting in a team of people who have sharp disagreements and who may
>> not be able to work together.

>> I've had enough bad experiences with committees and groups in the past
>> that I've developed a deep dislike of voting or nomination systems that
>> don't take into account the ability of the chosen slate to work with
>> each other. I'd rather end up with a weaker candidate who can
>> cooperate with the leading candidate than the two strongest candidates
>> who will then be at loggerheads.

> That argument makes sense for technical groups, where accomplishing a
> clearly defined task is the primary mission, but this is supposed to be
> the basis for electing the first ever social committee, which doesn't
> have a straightforward mission (or at least, we're inventing the mission
> ad hoc .

Hm, my experience is that this is *way* more important for social groups
than it is for technical groups. Now, if one is electing essentially a
legislature, where each member is expected to vote and work independently,
it's not as big of a problem. But if the group is ever expected to work
by consensus or common ground, this sort of voting system is, IMO, a huge
problem.

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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 01:38:26AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> >> I've had enough bad experiences with committees and groups in the past
> >> that I've developed a deep dislike of voting or nomination systems that
> >> don't take into account the ability of the chosen slate to work with
> >> each other.
>
> > That argument makes sense for technical groups, where accomplishing a
> > clearly defined task is the primary mission, but this is supposed to be
> > the basis for electing the first ever social committee, which doesn't
> > have a straightforward mission (or at least, we're inventing the mission
> > ad hoc .
>
> Hm, my experience is that this is *way* more important for social groups
> than it is for technical groups. Now, if one is electing essentially a
> legislature, where each member is expected to vote and work independently,
> it's not as big of a problem. But if the group is ever expected to work
> by consensus or common ground, this sort of voting system is, IMO, a huge
> problem.

I don't get it. Isn't the point of "consensus" to get agreement from an
entire group, or at least the entire relevant part of the group? If we use
a voting system that aims to eliminate conflicting options, and instead have
a small set of compatible options win, then that's not really aiming for
a consensus, it's just aiming for a majority.

If the social committee represents only the majority, it instantly loses
credibility, and in Debian, that would pretty much be its ruin.

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* Russ Allbery <rra.TakeThisOut@debian.org> [071009 11:23]:
> It's not about opinions. It's about people. The problem most often
> materializes when there are heated opinions, but the fundamental problem
> is when people can't work together with mutual respect. If you end up
> with people who intensely dislike each other, the group will have an
> exceedingly hard time reaching consensus on anything.
>
> It's one of those sorts of landmine situations where it looks like it
> works fine up until the point where there's a major problem that provokes
> a lot of heated disagreement, and that's when the body designed to try to
> defuse such situations is most vulnerable to a breakdown of civility and
> willingness to work together among its members.

But if there is such an situation and there is heated disagreement
outside of this body, how would having only one side of that in the body
help? That would only make a body supposed to defuse such a situation
to be weapon for one side and thus could even rise such a problem to
much higher spheres.

Thus I think something more proportional is better than something more
cloneful. Unless someone comes up with an idea for a system where anyone
disliked stronly by a reasonable large minority cannot become elected at
all. (and that system is not vulnerable to tactical voting, which I
think it most likely would be as there is no way to let people honestly
distinguish between "I dislike" and "I like the other side better").

Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link


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Russ Allbery <rra.RemoveThis@debian.org> wrote: [...]
> It's not about opinions. It's about people. The problem most often
> materializes when there are heated opinions, but the fundamental problem
> is when people can't work together with mutual respect. If you end up
> with people who intensely dislike each other, the group will have an
> exceedingly hard time reaching consensus on anything.

There are two situations in danger of being confused there:
- people who intensely dislike each other; and
- people who intensely dislike each other's views.

> [...] unless there's some feeling that the other members of the
> committee "have one's back" so to speak and are willing to put some effort
> into presenting a united front, I think you're going to have a really
> serious burnout problem.

I would be disappointed and fairly concerned about a social committee
which presented a united front in most ways, except how to deal with a
problem. I think we should be expecting a social committee that
speaks with several voices about a problem, but agrees a course of
action.

> [...] In other words, to what degree is the committee expected to be
> a decision-making body and to what degree is it expected to be a
> facilitator?

Personally, I expect it to be a facilitator almost always and almost
never a decision-making body. Sometimes I expect it to suggest how to
decide something, but give everyone involved opportunities to avoid a
destructive decision by their own actions.

Regards,
--
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Josip Rodin <joy.DeleteThis@entuzijast.net> wrote: [...]
> So, scrapping that - how does the election of multiple candidates in
> the SPI board election work? (weasel?)

Badly. I think it's similar to election-by-blacklist. It seems
particularly vulnerable to prejudice and smears, which should kill off
any debian social committee if those influence its election. If we
used a similar system, social committee couldn't really predict
consensus with most minorities, because only majority-acceptable
representatives of minorities (poodles?) would get elected.

Proportionality is very important for a social-committee. If it has
deep disagreements on certain topics (like Anglo-Victorian values, for
example), then it will be correctly reflecting the wider social
situation. The important thing will be to give it deadlock-busting
working methods.

In more detail on the SPI voting system:
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.spi.general/482
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2007/spi#elections

Hope that helps,
--
MJ Ray http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html tel:+44-844-4437-237 -
Webmaster-developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop builder,
consumer and workers co-operative member http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ -
Writing on koha, debian, sat TV, Kewstoke http://mjr.towers.org.uk/


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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:22:41AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> The problem most often materializes when there are heated opinions, but
> the fundamental problem is when people can't work together with mutual
> respect. If you end up with people who intensely dislike each other, the
> group will have an exceedingly hard time reaching consensus on anything.

MJ and Bernhard made good points already, I'll just concentrate on a few
bits that troubled me: I don't agree with these two premises - that any
two elected Debianites would so intensely dislike each other to cause
a deadlock in the rest of the group, or that this deadlock would spread
onto all other issues (other than the one they over which they originally
came in conflict). I do not see any historical precedent in Debian history
to reach that harsh a conclusion.

> One of the things that I find troubling about the idea of the social
> committee is that I think it takes the idea of a democratic body and some
> vague notions that smart people can work anything out and applies them to
> problems that are considerably thornier than the technical problems our
> existing example deals with. Constructing organizations that can
> effectively deal with social problems is way harder than constructing a
> technical committee and I'm worried that insufficient attention is being
> paid to some of the fuzzier aspects of how such a group can work together.

It's not just a matter of us Debianites really being smart people who can
work anything out it's that we actually currently try to do the soc-ctte
job in conflict situations *without* having a soc-ctte, and we generally
succeed. And the whole project is practically a social experiment, we deal
with social problems every day, whenever there's a misunderstanding on a bug
report or a squabble on the mailing lists. Having soc-ctte couldn't undo
this history of good faith effort to get along with each other; should it
ever go so perverted to actually harm the... social fabric of the project(?)
we can always repeal it.

> I am perhaps excessively wary, having served on the governance boards of
> things like Usenet hierarchy administration in the past and having seen
> some of the spectacular ways in which this can go wrong. Boards of
> directors do do this sort of thing all the time. But they usually don't
> have to address quite the same kind of problems.

Yes, and the circumstances in these two types of organization are different
- in both cases the membership comes together to work on a common interest,
but there is an inherent desire to maintain control of the organization.
In Debian, however, we really have no tangible control over the
organization, because the main asset of the organization is - the people.
(Hm, that sounded awfully like "the network is the computer"

> > If the social committee represents only the majority, it instantly loses
> > credibility, and in Debian, that would pretty much be its ruin.
>
> I think it depends a lot on what role you expect the committee to take.
> If the role of the committee is to serve as peacemaker and facilitator, it
> doesn't matter as much whether or not it's representative; it would matter
> a great deal more whether the members were people capable of acting in
> that role.

In either case it would not be nearly as useful if it wasn't credible.
History has shown, in real life and in Debian, that ad hoc peacemakers
can't get much work done, whenever the parties in conflict don't put trust
in them.

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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:29:23AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> To select "events coordinators", for example, we might want to have
> five people each on a different continent, even though three of the
> best events coordinators happen to be in Europe, on the basis that one
> European, one North American and one South/Latin American would be more
> useful than three Europeans.

BTW, that's the question of whether a single election with multiple winners
is the right election to use. In that case, it's better to simply have five
elections, one for each continent, but allowing the same candidate to run
for more than one seat.

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On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 15:55:11 +0200, Josip Rodin <joy.DeleteThis@entuzijast.net> said:

> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:29:23AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
>> To select "events coordinators", for example, we might want to have
>> five people each on a different continent, even though three of the
>> best events coordinators happen to be in Europe, on the basis that
>> one European, one North American and one South/Latin American would
>> be more useful than three Europeans.

> BTW, that's the question of whether a single election with multiple
> winners is the right election to use. In that case, it's better to
> simply have five elections, one for each continent, but allowing the
> same candidate to run for more than one seat.

If the same candidate wins all elections, or if people from one
city win all elections, would that be an acceptable outcome?

manoj
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On Tue, 9 Oct 2007 14:19:43 +0200, Josip Rodin <joy RemoveThis @entuzijast.net> said:

> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 02:22:41AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> The problem most often materializes when there are heated opinions,
>> but the fundamental problem is when people can't work together with
>> mutual respect. If you end up with people who intensely dislike each
>> other, the group will have an exceedingly hard time reaching
>> consensus on anything.

> MJ and Bernhard made good points already, I'll just concentrate on a
> few bits that troubled me: I don't agree with these two premises -
> that any two elected Debianites would so intensely dislike each other
> to cause a deadlock in the rest of the group, or that this deadlock
> would spread onto all other issues (other than the one they over which
> they originally came in conflict). I do not see any historical
> precedent in Debian history to reach that harsh a conclusion.

Err. I see an immediate historical precedent, which in fact lead
to a recent expulsion. Several mailing lists became poisoned to the
level that people left off volunteering. If it happened once, it can
happen again ...

manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta RemoveThis @debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 09:26:53AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> To select "events coordinators", for example, we might want to have
> >> five people each on a different continent, even though three of the
> >> best events coordinators happen to be in Europe, on the basis that
> >> one European, one North American and one South/Latin American would
> >> be more useful than three Europeans.
>
> > BTW, that's the question of whether a single election with multiple
> > winners is the right election to use. In that case, it's better to
> > simply have five elections, one for each continent, but allowing the
> > same candidate to run for more than one seat.
>
> If the same candidate wins all elections, or if people from one
> city win all elections, would that be an acceptable outcome?

I wasn't trying to provide an end-all solution to the said problem

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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 09:24:41AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >> The problem most often materializes when there are heated opinions,
> >> but the fundamental problem is when people can't work together with
> >> mutual respect. If you end up with people who intensely dislike each
> >> other, the group will have an exceedingly hard time reaching
> >> consensus on anything.
>
> > MJ and Bernhard made good points already, I'll just concentrate on a
> > few bits that troubled me: I don't agree with these two premises -
> > that any two elected Debianites would so intensely dislike each other
> > to cause a deadlock in the rest of the group, or that this deadlock
> > would spread onto all other issues (other than the one they over which
> > they originally came in conflict). I do not see any historical
> > precedent in Debian history to reach that harsh a conclusion.
>
> Err. I see an immediate historical precedent, which in fact lead
> to a recent expulsion. Several mailing lists became poisoned to the
> level that people left off volunteering. If it happened once, it can
> happen again ...

Oh, but that's just not the same, the expulsed person was not an elected
member of a general committee.

The best historical precedents for a lot of disagreement on general
positions was when everyone was pissed off at Bruce, or even better when
aj and you disagreed about policy, but those situations were settled in
a much calm manner than the Sven affair.

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Josip Rodin writes ("electing multiple people"):
> So, I proposed the following addition to the section A.6. Vote Counting
> (part of appendix A Standard Resolution Procedure):

As I've said in the meeting at Debconf and on debian-project, I think
this is the wrong way to do because this voting system implicitly asks
the wrong question.

Voting systems like STV and its derivatives (including Condorcet)
assume that:
* The number of people to be appointed is fixed in advance
* The candidates ought to compete against each other.
These assumptions are not true for our social committee.

We discussed at some length in the meeting at Debconf the problem with
electing a social committee, namely that a good social committee will
do much of its work informally, quietly and behind the scenes. So the
most effective members will have nothing to show.

Actively harmful SC members will be easy to spot of course because
they'll cause flamewars etc. Inactive or lazy SC members are not a
problem and we can just keep them.


So, as I have said before, we should use straight per-candidate
approval voting.

That is: the DPL should propose candidates, which the electorate will
separately vote on. That is, if the DPL proposes
Alice
Bob
Carol
Dave
Elspeth
then each voter gets to choose
Alice ? - choose Yes/No/Abstain
Bob ? - choose Yes/No/Abstain
etc.
and if more people vote `yes' for Alice than vote `no' for Alice then
Alice is appointed - regardless of any votes for or against Bob,
Carol, etc.

This means that if we have lots of candidates we like we have a big
committee. I think this is fine if the committee has a reasonably
streamlined process for making its own decisions. Even the cumbersome
process mandated for the TC seems to cope fairly well with TC members
who fail to participate, and of course we should give the SC the
ability to set its own rules.

There would have to be a minimum committee size, in case the voters
rejected too many of the candidates. If the committee falls below the
minimum size it loses its powers until more candidates are proposed,
approved and appointed.


Ian.


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On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 07:45:53PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> That is: the DPL should propose candidates, which the electorate will
> separately vote on.

Well, what can I say other than - the scheme where we depend on the DPL to
propose candidates doesn't work if the DPL never does anything even
approaching the actual proposal of candidates Maybe it would be best to
put this whole part off until there's a general GR affirming the charter.

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