Way too many categories

Hey, we should do this. Who is the council, and why are they important? There are like 5 active users, at best, and it seems like 3 of them agree.

rob

This post is deleted!

Jack Waugh

@andy-dienes, sorry I dragged my feet on this. I just now sent a link to the council members so they can vote on when to meet. To see who they are, you can go all the way back to the home page and click on About.

BTernaryTau

@andy-dienes said in Way too many categories:

Single Winner
Proportional Representation
Other Reform Discussion
News / Advocacy / Projects
Meta / Forum Business

This seems like a good set of categories, though it does awkwardly place non-proportional multi-winner methods under "Other Reform Discussion".

@jack-waugh said in Way too many categories:

More background: two people volunteered to moderate the forum and the council accepted them. Only one of those two has taken an action by way of moderating. I did not volunteer to moderate, because I felt I had put in enough work by setting up the server VM, installing NodeBB, setting up a half-assed backup scheme, and coding the archive presenting software and the site home page. I have not even really bothered to master the admin ifc to NodeBB; I pointedly left that work to others. I mention this in reply to @rob saying that I "run" this forum. I do not run it, in a social sense. I do have the keys to the server and can change privileges in the user list.

I know at one point I tentatively volunteered to be a moderator if necessary. Unfortunately I haven't been active enough on these forums to justify an application, but maybe it would be worth it for me to try and become more active if the forum is in need of moderation? Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the situation.

Jack Waugh

@bternarytau said in Way too many categories:

if the forum is in need of moderation

I feel that we have been lucky so far and not needed much moderation, but maybe others don't agree.

I only said what I said about it here to make clearer the nature of my own involvement. The context of a mention of the existence of the forum council seemed like a good context in which to write that clarification.

Toby Pereira

@bternarytau said in Way too many categories:

@andy-dienes said in Way too many categories:

Single Winner
Proportional Representation
Other Reform Discussion
News / Advocacy / Projects
Meta / Forum Business

This seems like a good set of categories, though it does awkwardly place non-proportional multi-winner methods under "Other Reform Discussion".

I thought this as well. I think a better category would be Multi-Winner Methods rather than one for PR specifically.

Toby Pereira

Thinking about this, I don't think we even need five categories. I would just have one main one for everything this forum is really about, one for forum business as already suggested, and then one for off-topic - so three in total. Some discussions can cut across the categories, like a method that could have a single-winner or a multi-winner version. And as I know I'm not the only one who generally sorts by recency, it's not that important to have very specific categories.

Jack Waugh

What is the cost or what are the drawbacks of having too many categories?

I feel there is merit in separating discussion of well-known systems from proposing crazy new ones. Also, some of us are really interested in the political significance of single-winner systems and I feel I am not intelligent enough (or not willing to pay the required level of attention for understanding) to spend much time on the effort to delve into multiwinner systems.

Marylander

@jack-waugh We could use tags to retain some of the information lost by cutting the number of categories.

@jack-waugh The cost is that the forum is difficult to navigate, and it is hard to stumble upon interesting material. For example, say I'm doing research into a novel proportional representation method for a legislature that gives substantial control to parties for candidate nomination (e.g. closed list). I've both developed new mathematical models as well as designed some statistical analysis on simulated data and created some visualizations.

Do I put that thread in Research and Projects, in the subcategory Research, or in the subsubcategory Simulations. Actually wait no, I want this to be actually used in my home country, so I should put the thread in Election Policy and Reform, but that one too has a seemingly relevant subcategory Forms of Government which looks like it might be right since that's what my method is: a new form of government.

Don't even get me started if I should put it in the top level category of Voting Method Discussion, its seemingly synonymous subcategory Voting Methods, or that subsubcategory Multi-winner, or the subsubSUBcategory Proportional Representation. Any of these could be the correct category, unless of course I want to just stick my thread under New Voting Methods and Variations like everybody else seems to be doing

There are 10 different places that I could reasonably put my thread, many of which are redundant, and many of which are barren. Personally, I think this is a huge and unnecessary barrier to engagement for new users of the forum.

Jack Waugh

@marylander, how do you put in tags when submitting a new post? When editing one of your own posts?

Marylander

@jack-waugh It is at the very bottom of the screen. It appears in the same place whether you are creating a new topic or editing the head post of an old one.

Edit: Send me a message if you are having trouble finding it.

rob

If it was up to me, if you go to the main domain page, it would route you to the recent topics page, and on that page (and all the forum pages) there would be links to other parts of the forum as well as to such things as the archives page.

This would probably make it a lot more googlable as well as just making it easier on new visitors. The intro page is not inviting, and the page you get to when you click through to the forums is even less so.

Now that the forum has been running for a while and is stable (good job, @Jack-Waugh ) we should be putting some effort into design / user experience and making it more search engine friendly.

There's a whole ton of other things we could be doing (unlike reddit's EndFPTP and election method email list, we have a lot of capabilities neither of them have), but this design/ux stuff is pretty critical if we want more activity (and therefore have any impact whatsoever beyond amusing ourselves talking about stuff).

Jack Waugh

This forum was conceived as a replacement for a forum that the Center for Election Science had been operating and that they said they would shut down (and indeed eventually they did shut it down). The individuals conceiving it, and those originally did not include me, met as an "interim council". This interim council eventually formed the real council for overseeing the implementation and operation of this forum. So that is the history that explains why there is a "council" relative to this forum and why I feel some obligation to honor its dictates.

I am still trying to get the forum council to make a decision about the categories and some other questions. There are four members, including me. If we meet, it is my intention to resign from the council effective at the end of the meeting. One member seems to have a really busy schedule. Another has expressed willingness to meet. From another, I have not heard lately. I don't recall if the council ever decided a rule for itself about requiring a quorum to make a decision.

Not sure based on what criteria/constraints stakeholders should consider giving up on the current council and forming a new regime for running this forum. I do not want to participate in deciding that (because of what has been said about my posts being inappropriate). But I have the keys to the domain registration, so some action by me would be necessary to put any revolution in power.

Even as I plan to reduce my arguing in this forum and withdraw from decisionmaking processes, I plan to continue to offer technical consulting for free for what it may be worth. I have some rudimentary understanding about at least one technique for hosting, that being the technique currently in effect. I wrote the archive code and plan to respond about any defects in it about which I may happen to receive reports.

rob

I think the solution to the "council is too busy" issue is that people on this forum, in a thread rather than a video chat meeting, fully discuss and hopefully come to a sort of consensus on forum organization and site design issues. This should make it a lot easier on council members who are too busy to schedule a meeting.

I started one here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/293/forum-change-requests-that-need-council-approval

Tagging @cfrank @Marylander @Andy-Dienes

BTW, @Jack-Waugh we do appreciate all you've done to get this forum/site running and keep it running, and understand if you want to step back a bit. The board is running great, almost no real technical issues and we've got a lot more embedding capabilities than Reddit or election methods email list. We should talk about ways we might lighten the load on you. For instance, I would be glad to do some simple mockups for tweaked/reworked site navigation, and help deploy it if approved.

SaraWolk

NOTE: This thread all happened when I was in Canada last fall taking care of family business. Upon getting back in September I promptly found out that my household received a no-cause eviction and had to find a place for my whole household to move short notice in the midst of a housing crisis. I've just completed that move, launched a statewide ballot initiative, published a paper, our lawsuit for voter disenfranchisement regarding the Eugene Ballot initiative for 2020 was escalated to federal court, as well as a few personal things as well. Life is not usually this busy, but sometimes it is. While considering updates to the categories list is interesting, I think it might be helpful for Forum users to recognize that people who don't check the forum every day might have more urgent priorities and that that doesn't mean they don't care. I didn't lead the charge to schedule a meeting right then (which requires a fair bit of time to organize and host) because I didn't have time to do so. I put it on the to do list and here we are.

Post: A lot of thought and input from way more people than are here on this thread went into the current categories so I'm hesitant to change them, but am open minded and would support simplifying them somewhat. There are good pros and cons in the thread above. The intention to have them as they are was that the forum can scale to include and welcome other reform advocates beyond voting "theorists". I still see that as very possible and as a personal priority for what I'd like to see in this forum.

We did have consensus that we wanted the "Recent" page to be the default when we launched and I think I tried to do at one point but we didn't figure out how, so we can absolutely do that now.

rob

[edited]

SaraWolk

@rob It was a post and discussion on the old forum. I just tried digging it up in the archives but didn't find it. Pretty sure that was back when you were still involved. My memory is that we got feedback from 10-15 people and that everyone had opinions and reasoning to share, but it was a long time ago.

If you are wondering why people who used to post more don't right now, I encourage you to reach out to them. Many are still active in other spaces and might have insight to share.

rob

[edited since it was harsh]

Toby Pereira

@sarawolk said in Way too many categories:

A lot of thought and input from way more people than are here on this thread went into the current categories so I'm hesitant to change them, but am open minded and would support simplifying them somewhat. There are good pros and cons in the thread above. The intention to have them as they are was that the forum can scale to include and welcome other reform advocates beyond voting "theorists". I still see that as very possible and as a personal priority for what I'd like to see in this forum.

I definitely agree that there should be room more more than just theory-based posts. But I think I've said before that we probably only need one category for the theory (no need for separate single/multi-winner I'd say), especially as people will likely sort by recency and use the search anyway. And then you can have forum business, off-topic, and another one for things like projects and advocacy.

As it is, you'd never look for a thread by going through the subforums because there are, as the thread title suggests, way too many categories.

I think I suggested above that we don't even need as many as five but I definitely think it would be overkill to be in double figures. There's about 25 at the moment, and I think it will put people off if anything.