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The election committee met this morning to finalize education material for
the board.

In attendance:
Troy Toman
Alan Clark
Tim Bell
Simon Anderson
Tristan Goode
Mark McLoughlin
Monty Taylor
Mark Raddcliffe

The group reviewed the documents that will be provided to the board for
Thursday meeting.  The Condorcet method was discussed first.  Mark
requested that we continue to look for examples of where it is used in
elections that seat a board in a corporate sense, and not for technical
direction.  We asked Monty to better delineate his usage examples in the
body of document in this regard.  The detail was considered appropriate to
present to the board, but will need to be augmented if selected.

Simon then discussed and described his write up of the STV system.  We
questioned Simon on the topic of would the electorate have to rank all
candidates to cast a vote.  Simon indicated that this would not be the case
as it might diminish turn out, and Todd indicated it might also create
issues with a bias towards the order of names on the ballot.  It was
requested that Simon better describe what happens to the remaining votes
when a voter chooses to not rank all but one or a few of the candidates.
It was observed that in the Condorcet system a block of 51% could control
the entire slates results, and Simon was asked to add similar text to the
effects of blocks with the STV process.

Some discussion was had on the desirability of blocks gaining
representation under any system.  There are two sides to the argument.
Condorcet provides the voters with the opportunity to select the
winners by a method that yields the "best compromise" candidate, the one
that the largest majority will find to be least disagreeable, even if not
their favorite.  STV can still allow blocks to come together in a more
straight forward manner to gain representation.  Simon pointed out that it
may even be desirable, as the organization has grown,  to see voters from
world wide geographies gain representation in this fashion.  While the
concerns over corporate dominance have persisted, growth in the population
has cut the share of the electorate from major corporations down to be only
10% of the eligible vote.  Any election will have an edge to the most
visible highest contributing members of the community.

We then discussed the board meeting.  Todd will open up the discussion with
a brief summary of why we have returned, highlight the 3 systems up for
consideration (including existing) and then give 15 minutes to Monty and
then Simon for a brief description period and then we will open it up to
questions and go into any philosophical discussions at the conclusion with
a charge to the board members to prepare for a vote on their preference at
the Nov. 4 meeting in Hong Kong.

Final materials are due to Todd, Alan and Jonathan by 5pm CDT as we wish
the board to have 24 hours to review the material.

As usual comments and corrections welcome.

Todd M. Moore

Director, Interoperability and Partnerships

11501 Burnet Rd. MS 9035H014
Austin, TX , 78758.  (512) 286-7643 (tie-line 363)
tmmoore at us.ibm.com
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