An idea to increase activity at this forum

rob

What if we had a "rule" that whenever you post, you may append a signature to your post that lists your preferred voting systems? (see mine at end, which shows scores from 0-100 for each listed method)

Obviously we wouldn't demand anyone do this to post, but if they choose to, they can. And they can't submit a ballot unless they actually post content.

Every so often, someone will collate them and show the "current winner". Any user would only have their "ballot" counted once, but if we do the tabulation more often it encourages people to come back regularly and post, since if you don't post during the time span, your opinion doesn't get counted.

Obviously there are other benefits... we gradually converge on a few favored systems, maybe just one.

And of course, whoever is tabulating them (which could be anyone, and I'd be glad to do it for a while if people are actually participating) would want to do it using multiple methods. If I did it, I'd be sure to show a pretty Condorcet matrix and probably various other things... at least if there were more than a few ballots.

I think we might draw in people from other forums, such as EndFPTP on reddit or the election methods mailing list, who might find it satisfying to be able to vote for their favorite voting method and see us actually moving toward something, which is better than just going round and round.

Cardinal Baldwin [100], STAR [50], Approval [25], IRV [20], Score [19], Borda[10], FPTP [0]

Keith Edmonds

@rob I like the idea. Perhaps we could have a widget which allows this that is separate from the posts. Doing it from the posts would be sloppy and cumbersome. How hard would to be to add a polling feature?

rob

@keith-edmonds The widget is something I worked on previously and was actually a part of my original post on the old forum, which suggested we do a new one in NodeBB and "eat our own dogfood" in terms of doing regular votes on voting methods.

But it's more work, and more of an "all or nothing" thing. I'm personally not willing to put that much effort into something until I see more activity. This is more of a "baby steps" approach. If people participate, I'd be willing to build it out further. (so, if someone says "sorry, it's too much work to put that on the end of my posts or to set up a signature" I'm kinda saying "sorry, it's too much work to build a nice widget" )

The main reason I suggested this newer idea of doing it on posts, is because it (in a sense) rewards people for posting regularly, since it gives them more influence over the "moving consensus." If you haven't posted in the last week (or whatever period between tabulating), you don't get a say. I can't speak for others, but it would give me a fairly strong incentive to post regularly.

Another thing is that every time you read a post by someone who does this, it promotes the feature. If it is just a poll, it remains somewhat hidden and people forget about it.

Built in polling widgets don't tend to be good at showing how everyone voted either. (I mean, they can, you just have to make it more complicated) You can have people coming in and creating fake accounts to use once for voting. This way, whoever tabulates can, for instance say "I'm ignoring this vote because they didn't post any significant content" or the like. It just gives more flexibility.

It also is potentially nice because anyone reading your posts has a good idea of where you stand. Even if no one bothers tabulating them, it serves a purpose. I'm just going to go ahead and put it on my signature going forward (not that I've been posting a lot, but still.... why not?)

That said, in the perfect world, yes there would be a nice voting widget.

Jack Waugh

I think that to make a meaningful tally, we have to agree on a finite set of candidates and they have to exclude one another. For example, any mention of Score has to give the range, or a range of ranges. If we're going to mention, say, certain Condorcet systems and then "all other Condorcet systems", or we're going to mention Score with certain ranges and then "Score with any other range", then all the "other" mentions have to be relative to the global list, not just that voter's list according to that voter's personal way of dividing up the space of possibilities.

@jack-waugh many voting methods are so similar to each other, I would be ok with bucketing them into large categories based on how they act on 3 cands.

E.g.:

Minimax-like Condorcet (includes Schulze, Ranked Pairs, Kemeny, River, Stable Voting, Split Cycle)
Score-like Condorcet (includes //Score methods, things like STAR3, Score Chain Climbing, Score Sorted Margins)
IRV-like Condorcet (includes Benham's, Woodall's, Tideman's, etc. methods)
Other Condorcet (including Copeland types, Black's method, RCIPE, Dodgson, etc.)
Median-based methods (including Bucklin, Majority Judgement, Usual Judgement, etc.)

Then a few that get their own category

Approval
IRV
FPTP

I only use such fidelity for the Condorcet methods because I suspect most people here are deep into that rabbit hole. Then perhaps can include one or two other.

In terms of "what voting method should we use to vote" I would suggest either https://star.vote/, https://stablevoting.org/, or an approval poll.

rob

@andy-dienes Thanks this is good, I like your groupings. I'd also like to hold votes that are more specific, such as "for a condorcet method, what is your preferred tiebreaker approach?" With possible answers combining ballot type (ranked, ranked allowing duplicates, rated 0-100, rated 0-5) and tiebreak tabulation method (irv, plurality, borda, score)

I don't want to do anything that requires a different log in or cookie or whatever, I'd like to know where the votes are coming from, and discourage people from voting more than once or voting if they don't even introduce themselves or participate in the community otherwise. So I'd prefer just collect the ballots manually for now, from posts and signatures here, and maybe posts on reddit's EndFPTP forum. There's also the election methods mailing list....

Remember that we can do a new one at any time, and anyone in the group can post one. I'll happily tabulate them and show pretty results and share my work on a forkable codepen , at least to get people started. Anyone is free to retabulate.

I was hoping to collect high-resolution cardinal ballots. I'd suggest rate on a scale of 0-10, decimal places allowed e.g. 5.76. If anyone wants to use a different scale, such as 0 to a million, fine, whatever...it will just be normalized anyway. And then we'll show results in a bunch of different methods. People can supply an approval threshold, if none supplied it defaults to 5. So mine might look like:

Copeland/IRV [10], Ranked Robin[9.5], Any Condorcet [9], Copeland/Normalized Score [8.7], Copeland/Score [8.5], Cardinal Baldwin [8], IRV [6], STAR [5], Approval [3], Score [2], Borda[1], FPTP [0]
ApprovalThreshold: 4

(that's using what is in my signature, but some of the groupings don't make sense for a real poll, especially "any condorcet")

I'll show some ideas for the pretty results display (hopefully with some interactivity or ability to animate or whatnot) soon. You may have seen some of my work in this direction....here's a some of it: (the Sankey diagram for IRV in the upper left isn't mine but it is uses an open source library to generate them)

@rob said in An idea to increase activity at this forum:

That said, in the perfect world, yes there would be a nice voting widget.

I'm gradually working toward that. I have experimented with running custom js in this forum and looking for things in posts that I can parse and replace and add interactivity. . (@Jack-Waugh has been trusting enough to allow me privileges so I can do that.... but currently nothing is running) Automatic server-side tabulation and external storage of poll data would come later if people stay interested. It's doable, but not needed to get it started.

Do you know javascript or typescript?