MOTU Leadership Teams - Membership Policy

[Neal McBurnett]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 08:20:36AM -0300, Cody A.W. Somerville wrote:
>  * Normal elections will start at an agreed date relative to a development
> milestone and polls will remain open until a second agreed date that is also
> relative to a development milestone. Once polls close, results will become
> available and a short period to allow for grievances and/or disputes to occur
> takes place. Finally, a third agreed date, which will also be relative to a
> development milestone, will mark the normal conclusion with the MOTU council
> officially announcing results and updating team memberships. If a grievance of
> dispute arises, the MOTU council will resolve the issue in 15 days of the third
> date or escalate the issue to the technical board.
> 
>  Although a voting system has not been agreed upon yet, two systems which have
> received a lot of discussion include Single Transferable Vote (used by some
> governments) and the Schulze method (used by Debian and Wikipedia among
> others). It is generally agreed that a preferential voting system, where voters
> would rank their preference of the candidates instead of voting for or against,
> is best.

I've been active in voting method discussions for a few decades now.
If we go with elections, my advice is to go with either Approval
Voting or Range Voting.  One benefit of them is the focus on
"supporting" folks (rather than a competition among folks), which can
contribute to a feeling of consensus.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
 http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.html
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

I'm not sure why STV is on the list since it is for party voting - do
we have parties in MOTU now?  I mean besides the great festive
gatherings that Daniel organizes?  ;-)

The ranked methods like IRV (and STV) and Schulze suffer from
increased complexity and confusion, and the risk of counter-intuitive
results.  E.g. with IRV it is possible that raising the rank of a
winning candidate on some ballots, which originally had ranked that
candidate last, could counter-intuitively result in the winning
candidate becoming a loser.  See

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_method
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

>  An alternative proposal by Emmet Hickory would have members be attached to a
> "release" and favors replacing team members through a process more
> closely related to apprenticeship than any sort of election. The team would
> define goals for a release, handle freeze exceptions for the release, and then
> follow the release as the SRU team until the release is no longer supported
> (all together, roughly terms of 2 years). His full e-mail can be found here:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2008-July/004169.

Make that  https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/2008-July/004169.html

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/