Open Stack

> The low (and dropping) level of turnout is worrying, particularly in
> light of that analysis showing the proportion of drive-by contributors
> is relatively static, but it is always going to be hard to discern the
> motives of people who didn't vote from the single bit of data we have on
> them.
> 
> There is, however, another metric that we can pull from the actual
> voting data: the number of candidates actually ranked by each voter:
> 
> Candidates
>    ranked    Frequency
> 
>       0        8   2%
>       1       17   3%
>       2       24   5%
>       3       20   4%
>       4       31   6%
>       5       36   7%
>       6       68  13%
>       7       39   8%
>       8       17   3%
>       9        9   2%
>      10       21   4%
>      11        -   -
>      12      216  43%
> 
> (Note that it isn't possible to rank exactly n-1 candidates.)
>
> So even amongst the group of people who were engaged enough to vote,
> fewer than half ranked all of the candidates. A couple of hypotheses
> spring to mind:
> 
> 1) People don't understand the voting system.
> 
> Under Condorcet, there is no such thing as tactical voting by an
> individual. So to the extent that these figures might reflect deliberate
> 'tactical' voting, it means people don't understand Condorcet. The size
> of the spike at 6 (the number of positions available - the same spike
> appeared at 7 in the previous election) strongly suggests that lack of
> understanding of the voting system is at least part of the story. The
> good news is that this problem is eminently addressable.

Addressable by educating the voters on the subtleties of Condorcet, or
by switching to another model such as the single-transferable vote?  

I can see the attractions of Condorcet, in particular it tends to favor
consensus over factional candidates. Which could be seen as A Good Thing.

But in our case, seems to me, we're doubling down on consensus.

By combining Condorcet with staggered terms and no term limits, seems
we're favoring both consensus in general and the tendency to return the
*same* consensus candidates. (No criticism of the individual candidates
intended, just the sameness)

STV on the other hand combined with simultaneous terms, is actually
used in the real world[1] and has the advantage of ensuring factions
get some proportional representation and hence don't feel excluded
or disenfranchised.

Just a thought ... given that we're in the mood, as a community, to
consider radical structural reforms.

Cheers,
Eoghan

[1] so at least would be familiar to the large block of Irish and
    Australian voters ... though some centenarian citizens of
    Marquette, Michigan, may be a tad more comfortable with Condorcet ;)


> 2) People aren't familiar with the candidates
> 
> This is the one that worries me - it looks a lot like most voters are
> choosing not to rank many of the candidates because they don't feel they
> know enough about them to have an opinion. It seems to me that the TC
> has failed to engage the community enough on the issues of the day to
> move beyond elections as a simple name-recognition contest. (Kind of
> like how I imagine it is when you have to vote for your local
> dog-catcher here in the US. I have to imagine because they don't let me
> vote.) It gets worse, because the less the TC tries to engage the
> community on the issues and the less it attempts to actually lead (as
> opposed to just considering checklists and voting to ask for more time
> to consider checklists), the more entrenched the current revolving-door
> membership becomes. So every election serves to reinforce the TC
> members' perception that everything is going great, and also to
> reinforce the perception of those whose views are not represented that
> the TC is an echo chamber from which their views are more or less
> structurally excluded. That's a much harder problem to address.
> 
> cheers,
> Zane.
> 
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Eoghan
> >
> >> So the proportion of single-patch committers is creeping up slowly, but
> >> not at a rate that would account for the decline in voter turnout.
> >>
> >> And since we've no way of knowing if voting patterns among the
> >> single-patch
> >> committers differs in any way from the norm, these data don't tell us
> >> much.
> >>
> >> If we're serious about improving participation rates, then I think we
> >> should consider factors what would tend to drive interest levels and
> >> excitement around election time. My own suspicion is that open races
> >> where the outcome is in doubt are more likely to garner attention from
> >> voters, than contests that feel like a foregone conclusion. That would
> >> suggest un-staggering the terms as a first step.
> >>
> >> Cheers,
> >> Eoghan
> >
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> > OpenStack-dev at lists.openstack.org
> > http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack-dev
> >
> 
> 
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