[IAEP] [SLOBS] SL member list/joining criterion

[Caryl Bigenho]

Hi All… A few comments on the discussion at hand...
Membership List:I hate to say this, but I think we need to go back to "square 1" on the active members list. I'm not sure how to do that but I can tell you this… ballots were sent to all of the names on Sebastian's list. I also sent several emails to both the IAEP and Support Gang lists reminding folks that the ballots had been sent out and had to be completed by the deadline date and time. CIVS does not give you a list of who actually voted. For security, they erase all emails after the ballots are sent. The only way I could tell if a person had voted was during the election time. If I tried to send a ballot to someone who had already voted, it told me so.
I also asked folks in emails to iaep and support gang to let me know if they had not received a ballot and felt they should have. Some people replied directly to me. I checked the larger membership list and if they were, in fact on it, I sent a ballot. I just looked at my old emails today and there was one from Tim Moody. I knew he was an active member but wasn't on Sebastian's list from the survey. So, when he asked for a ballot, I sent him a ballot. There were a few others in this category. The upshot is… we need a better, updated, list of active members. The last effort obviously didn't work out too well.
Psychologists who work with this sort of thing say it is better to ask folks to "opt out" rather than in as was done with the Lime Survey. Sending an email to all on the master (long list) to have them ask to be marked "inactive" would make sense. Rather than assume no reply means no interest, those who don't reply could be contacted personally, if possible, to astertain their wishes and left on the list until we hear that they want to be removed. I hope we can avoid the situation we had with the Lime Survey where several active contributors were removed. Who knows why they didn't reply? Some said they never received the Lime Survey.
Voting:We wasted a lot of time looking for the "perfect" voting system. It probably doesn't exist. Since all of the previous elections had used a ranking system and CIVS offered one, it seemed the best compromise since it was what SL members are used to using. There was, however, one tiny little facit I didn't notice until I had voted and an the election was closed. That was the ability to use ties rather than a "forced choice" (which we may have used before and I thought we were using this time). I marked my votes in a ranked order… but some did not. 
It is interesting to see how some people tried to use this hidden feature to manipulate the voting. Everyone is able to look at the votes without any voter names or id's. Here is the link to the CIVS results page… click on the button at the bottom to see all the available information: http://civs.cs.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/results.pl?id=E_dd38dc6aa11d1a98
To see how some people tried to manipulate things, look at voters #3, 20, and 54 for example, there are several others who took advantage of the system. Note there were 54 ballots cast. The voter numbers may appear in a different order on each visitors page since it says they were randomly generated. But you can probably find the ones I refer to.
So… It seems now is a good time to revisit voting systems and see if we can come up with a better system. I favor a simple ranking system with no ties (forced choice) where the ranks are added up and the candidate with the lowest number (thus highest ranking) is first and so on. But, maybe that is too simple. This is another thing the board should discuss and settle in plenty of time for the next election in Jan-Feb 2017.
Hopefully this helps refresh the memories of folks about the whole mixed up voting process. I hope we can make it better for 2017.
Caryl


> Subject: Re: [SLOBS] [IAEP] SL member list/joining criterion
> To: holt at laptop.org
> CC: dave at lab6.com; walter.bender at gmail.com; slobs at lists.sugarlabs.org; samsongoddy at hotmail.com; iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org; cbigenho at hotmail.com
> From: sebastian at fuentelibre.org
> Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 14:17:51 -0500
> 
> 
> 
> El 15/05/16 a las 13:38, Adam Holt escribió:
> > Sebastian, do you recall how many emails bounced by Dec 15th 2015 when
> > you verified 79 active members @
> > https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_Labs/Members/Survey2015, among
> > (about) 262 emails that you sent out ?  It would be interesting to
> > know if roughly 200 or so emails are still active, among the 264 email
> > addresses of members and former members now listed.  Not to put too
> > fine a point on it, but many of the email addresses are now dead, and
> > likely several (former) members themselves are no longer living, such
> > as Marco Pesenti Gritti :/
> 
> Of the ~262(+/-) emails sent, 50 bounced. Identifying them will take
> some processing.
> 
> > Of the (apparent) 275 living and dead people on both the "Email" tab
> (privacy-protected, for good reasons) and the "Public List" tab it's
> apparent that these lists are quite different from Line 211 to 276 --
> but in these are the same 65 people (roughly speaking those who joined
> since mid-2010?) then it's likely just that the 2 lists contain the same
> 65 names but appearing in a different order (one presumes?)
> >
> > There are small consistency error(s) like ANDRES AGUIRRE appears to
> have joined in 2015 according to the "Email" tab whereas the "Public
> list" tab says he joined in 2016; these lists should be reconciled for
> consistency at some point where we can.
> 
> Possibly. It would be good to clean it up. As far as i can recall, we
> have not edited, only added new members. Members without emails also
> need to be removed, IMHO. (I don't know how they were added in the first
> place).
 		 	   		  
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