[Theforum] voting

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Tue Oct 30 11:17:35 CST 2001


At 07:12 PM 1/30/2002, Mike King wrote:
>I now treat theforum as a painful read every few days, to see what's going
>on and who's bitching about who ;)
>I am _very_ interested, and would like to make more of an effort/impact,
>but it just seems so out of reach at the moment.

Ahem, OK, so I seem to have brought some people out of lurk mode ;)

Mike, I realise that list traffic can be excessive at times, which is why I
proposed that we have a way of tagging emails calling for a vote with a
marker like "Vote: " or "[Vote] ". This would help people set mail filters
that possibly highlight these messages.

Also, let me clarify that I didn't DEMAND that people who don't vote at
least once in three consecutive votes have their rights suspended. I was
wondering out loud if such a drastic measure would be required to get more
people to vote. (Incidentally, in Australia you are fined if you don't vote
in an election. It was $50 when I was there. Isaac?)

See, my worry is not about people abstaining from voting, but from
scenarios like this:

Joe Member proposes that we change the evolt.org colour scheme to orange.
12 people vote in favour, and 2 against. We make a decision to change the
colour scheme to orange and implement it. Then the other 55 members of
theforum who didn't vote say, "hey, who the hell authorised the colour
change? We didn't even reach simple majority. We need at least 35 people
out of 69 to +1 the issue."

So while we did get a majority +1 vote, it still wasn't a majority of *all*
the members in theforum.

Is that clearer?

What do we do in such cases? Assume that 12 votes are good enough and move
on? Or wait for 35 +1 votes?

There are times when I will disagree on a course of action, but once a
group decision is made, I'll abide by it and support it. I just want to
avoid unpleasant situations where people say that they will not support a
decision because they weren't part of it. At those times, I want the
ability to point to a vote and say, "look, a majority of us agreed on this
in a democratic manner, and that's what we're going to do."

Regards,

Madhu


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Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net




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