Simplifying the Forum Categories.
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A number of people have expressed agreement that we should simplify the forum's categories list. At today's Forum Council meeting we discussed the goals and proposals and decided to continue the conversation here on the Forum to finalize a proposal.
Goals:
- Easy to navigate and find posts.
- No overlap between categories. Each post should ideally have a clear place it should live. For "categories" that do overlap we can use tags.
- Not too many options. Easy to determine where your post should go.
- Welcoming and inviting: We want to create space for the larger electoral reform movement to use this forum for discussions that are currently happening elsewhere.
Here's the current list:
For reference here's an older thread on this topic.
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@sarawolk
Here's my current proposal (updated with feedback from many of you.) I'll keep updating/editing it with suggestions I like as I hear more ideas from more of you. Currently we have 7 higher level categories and 25 subcategories. My current proposal would bring us to 9 categories and 11 subcategories.-
Welcome:
** Introduce yourself
** Electoral Theory 101
** Forum Policy, Announcements, and Resources -
Advocacy and Events
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Voting Method Discussion:
** Voting Methods
** New Voting Methods -
Districting
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Money in Politics
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Election Integrity
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Forms of Government
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Meta:
** Meta Forum Discussion
** Issue Reports and Feature Requests
** Council, Mods, and Tech Team (private) -
Watercooler
If you have another proposal or just ideas and considerations to incorporate please comment and share below.
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@sarawolk I think that list is a lot better than what we currently have. But as discussed yesterday in the Zoom meeting, I think the four categories of Districting, Money in Politics, Election Integrity, and Forms of Government could be lumped together. I can't remember off the top of my head all the suggested names though.
Also voting methods / new voting methods - I wouldn't have a distinction, partly because a "new" method might just be a modification of an old one, which blurs the boundaries. Also a comparison between old and new methods might not have an obvious home.
And I'd probably extend it even more to general theoretical stuff. A topic on mathematical criteria (e.g. monotonicity) makes sense to me in the same section of the forum.
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@toby-pereira I think it's worth having them separate because they create space for those topics intentionally in a way that I hope will help encourage new people who work on those issues to use them.
I think it's really important to separate out new voting methods from vetted ones because discussion of new voting methods often is a lot of unproven opinions, unsubstantiated concerns, and generally a discussion that would be absolutely counterproductive and derailing if people in the advocacy space who think they know more than they do read it.
On the other hand I see the pros of consolidation as well.
As to ideas that we brainstormed for an other reforms type category, Eric had suggested Theory of Change (which I've never heard of before) and someone suggested Other Reforms or something like that. Having two discussion categories: "Electoral Reform Discussion" and "Voting Method Discussion" could work. I don't like the framing of "other xyz" because it makes it sound like this forum is really mostly for voting method reform, which I hope we will grow past.
Another idea entirely would be to combine all of the voting and electoral reform topics, including voting methods, into one big Electoral Reform category. Then we could encourage people to tag posts with things like New Voting Methods, Money in Politics, Districting, Electoral College, Multi-Winner, STAR Voting, and more. I see some benefit to that, but the concern is that tags wouldn't be used or would be used inconsistently, so unless admin put in a lot of work on filing posts it would be a total mess in no time. If we did this (Call it proposal B w/ 5 categories, 6-12 subcategories), here's how the list would look:
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Welcome:
** Introduce yourself
** Electoral Theory 101
** Forum Policy, Announcements, and Resources -
Advocacy and Events
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Electoral Reform Discussion: (with or without subcategories?)
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Meta:
** Meta Forum Discussion
** Issue Reports and Feature Requests
** Council, Mods, and Tech Team (private) -
Watercooler
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@sarawolk maybe we can have a "Voting Theory" category with two subcategories, "The big picture", for discussing the more social and connective aspects of voting theory and "Down to the details" for getting into more technical theories and problems.
This could provide space for people to really theorize and make connections about collective decision making in general, whether that's in institutional, government or informal settings.
Actually it could be nice to have a "beyond categories" space too, similar to the watercooler but more geared as a catch all for voting/collective decision making discussion that's multidisciplinary or defies categories.
