[Election-software] Open-ish subscription as of now-ish; "no confidence" votes
Hi folks,
I've just let a few folks join earlier this afternoon. I had accidentally had the settings too restrictive, but hopefully, it's a bit easier to subscribe now, and my personal button mashing isn't a hurdle to subscription. I'm really happy with how the membership of this mailing list is shaping up, since I know most of you (at least, I know your online presence), and I'm reasonably sure that most of y'all have both programming chops and voting science chops, which is the exact set of folks that I was hoping to see. Please: invite your friends!
Also, I'm hoping y'all can all give some advice on moderation policy here. Over at the election-methods list, there were a couple of folks that became very unpopular over the past few months. I won't go into details, but at least one of them left in a huff because I sent them a private email that they found disagreeable (or rather, they want to unsubscribe, but also seem to want white-glove service on a self-service mailing list). Then the other problematic member complained on-list about my private email. It's a little emotionally taxing on me to have to send behavioral emails to members (letting them know just how unpopular they are), and thus, I like mathematical rules for this type of thing.
I like the idea of having "no confidence" votes on the membership of the mailing list. I sent (what I thought were) pretty clear instructions for voting to the election-methods mailing list on our first trial "no confidence" vote, which resulted in a chaotic mess of feedback. It was no problem; I got the gist, and learned about some of the more subtle interactions on the list (and I received apologies from people who owed me no apology).
I've included my initial email to the EM-list regarding my idea for "no confidence" votes. Despite my complaining about the lack of structure from the feedback, I found the results helpful. To preemptively answer a question you might have: no, I'm not publishing the ballot data. :-) 'Tis a mess on SO MANY levels.
My question: assuming this list doesn't lurk in obscurity forever, on the undesirable but probably inevitable occasion that we have a problematic member of the list (or two, or three, or five people who don't play nice with one another), what should we do about it?
Rob ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Rob Lanphier roblan@gmail.com Date: Sat, Jul 20, 2024 at 11:57 PM Subject: Should we allow "voting off" this mailing list? To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Hi folks,
I've received a couple of complaints about the tenor of this mailing list. My cursory look through the archives suggests that the problems are with a couple of people.
I'm trying to sort it out with the people about whom the complaints are about, but something occurred to me. There's been lots of "votes" on this mailing list, which I've never been a big fan of, because the group of people who are active on this list are self-selected. However, there's one thing y'all are the exact right people to vote on, which is "who should be on this mailing list?". It may be good to have times where y'all get to vote a person or two off of the mailing list "Survivor"-style, though I want to make sure that this list is a safe place for smart people with unconventional communication styles to express unpopular opinions every now and then.
I'm announcing today is the first day of voting in this election. Please send me a private ballot (to me only, not to the list) in the following example format:
- A - This person ("A") is my favorite person posting on the list. (Please only vote for one or two "favorites", though I won't mind if you gush about three or four people in this first round of voting)
- CCCCC - These people ("C", "C", "C", "C", and "C") are usually pretty reasonable, and though I disagree with them sometimes (or perhaps almost every message they send), their messages are generally thoughtful and well-expressed. It would make me sad if they decided to unsubscribe to this mailing list, and are driven off the list by the more obnoxious/prolific posters. I'm sometimes thinking of these people specifically when I write emails to the list, because I want to reach these people.
- FFF - These people ("F", "F", and "F") are almost always sending unacceptable messages to this list, and they do it A LOT. It's not just annoying, it's toxic. I've been tempted to unsubscribe mainly because of THEIR messages (and some of you may say "I have done it a time or two in the past").
I really want concise email ballots, though I'm allowing for a little prose to explain why you put someone at the "A" tier or why you're relegating anyone to the "FFF" tier. Try to have at least one person in the "A" tier for every person you put in the "FFF" tier. The "CCCCC" tier should really just be a list.
This is an experiment. I'm going to be traveling soon, so I'm hoping to have the first set of ballots by end-of-day Monday (and note: my end-of-day is probably later than your end-of-day, especially if you're not in the United States). I don't mind if you email me personally and say "I'd like a little more time to think about this". I probably won't try figuring out how to aggregate everyone's feedback about other list members until August, but those of you who vote early will have my gratitude. If you want to propose other ballot formats than what I suggest above, that's okay, but I think I'm going to insist on using my three-tier "A", "CCCCC", and "FFF" tiers, and using those names. I'm going to be hand aggregating ballots, so the more novel you are with your ballots, the less likely I'm going to be to consider your ballot.
I'm not likely to act soon on the first set of ballots unless there are a lot of ballots that put the same person(s) in the "FFF" category. I'm not planning on holding these votes at any particular interval, but maybe we should devise a set of rules for calling a "vote of no confidence" in the current membership of the mailing list. It may be that only people who post 5 or more times per month are eligible to be voted off the island, so to speak. I haven't decided, but your comments are welcome!
Rob p.s. I've started work setting up an alternative mailing list to discuss voting software. I'm more likely to read all of the messages to this alternative mailing list, so I'm less likely to be patient with people that ruin the reading experience for the lurkers on the list.
On 2024-07-24 23:04, Rob Lanphier via Election-software wrote:
Hi folks,
I've just let a few folks join earlier this afternoon. I had accidentally had the settings too restrictive, but hopefully, it's a bit easier to subscribe now, and my personal button mashing isn't a hurdle to subscription. I'm really happy with how the membership of this mailing list is shaping up, since I know most of you (at least, I know your online presence), and I'm reasonably sure that most of y'all have both programming chops and voting science chops, which is the exact set of folks that I was hoping to see. Please: invite your friends!
Perhaps posting something on Reddit's endfptp or votingtheory could encourage people to join; I think they're somewhat more simulation-focused than people on the EM list, or at least that's been my impression. has the There may be other forums too; I think CES has one? And there's https://www.votingtheory.org/, though I think it might be kinda dead.
Also, I'm hoping y'all can all give some advice on moderation policy here. Over at the election-methods list, there were a couple of folks that became very unpopular over the past few months. I won't go into details, but at least one of them left in a huff because I sent them a private email that they found disagreeable (or rather, they want to unsubscribe, but also seem to want white-glove service on a self-service mailing list). Then the other problematic member complained on-list about my private email. It's a little emotionally taxing on me to have to send behavioral emails to members (letting them know just how unpopular they are), and thus, I like mathematical rules for this type of thing.
The way it usually goes (on forums where I've been posting/lurking at least) is that someone lets the admin know if someone else is making trouble, and then the admin looks at things and decides whether to do something about it.
Maybe it would feel less taxing if you had some intermediate measures, like temporary bans or cooldown periods instead of the only choice being either letting them continue or kicking them out.
But if it's writing behavioral mails of any kind that's taxing, then that wouldn't help, of course. In that case, there's another problem. If the votes are public, then the voters might not want to be the ones pointing the finger at anyone either.
But if the votes *aren't* public, then someone would still have to look at the private votes and say "you're unpopular because x people think you're making a mess of the list". You'd still have to write a behavioral mail, it would just be "I can kick you off the list since x people think you're being obnoxious" instead of "I can kick you off the list since I heard some people complain and I think they're right". I'm not sure how much that would buy you.
My question: assuming this list doesn't lurk in obscurity forever, on the undesirable but probably inevitable occasion that we have a problematic member of the list (or two, or three, or five people who don't play nice with one another), what should we do about it?
The informal way would be: have people who object send you mail, then you make a judgement call.
If you're going to do a vote of no confidence instead, my idea would be something like:
If someone complains to you about a user, ask the list to send you their F candidates. If a candidate gets enough Fs, kick him (or do some temporary measure).
While it's nice to know who the A and C users are, it's not really relevant to a no confidence vote.
I still think the informal method is better, though :-)
-km
Hi Kristofer,
I haven't yet started really promoting this list, in part because I launched the list just before travelling, and also partly because I have some plans to promote some of my own software as part of my efforts to promote this mailing list. There's a feature I've been working on that I thought was a two-day feature that has been three weeks and counting (albeit with the aforementioned travel time in the middle). If y'all want to start promoting the list, please do! I'll get around to it eventually.
If you (or anyone else on this mailing list) has software they'd like to promote, please do that as well! We have a "Software" page on electowiki, which is kind of a disaster in the way that it's organized, but it's better than nothing (and please add stuff that's missing): https://electowiki.org/wiki/Software
As it turns out, Neal McBurnett put together a fantastic list of links that someone should incorporate into the page above somehow: https://github.com/electorama/abif/issues/29
That feature to abiftool that's been slowing me down is taking some code I wrote back in 2018 to parse the San Francisco elections format and incorporating that into abiftool. I thought I'd be able to incorporate it quickly, but ... well.... I imagine it might have been faster to start over from scratch. With any luck, I'll be able to make some faster progress this week.
Rob
On Fri, Aug 2, 2024 at 7:28 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm < km-elmet@munsterhjelm.no> wrote:
On 2024-07-24 23:04, Rob Lanphier via Election-software wrote:
Hi folks,
I've just let a few folks join earlier this afternoon. I had accidentally had the settings too restrictive, but hopefully, it's a bit easier to subscribe now, and my personal button mashing isn't a hurdle to subscription. I'm really happy with how the membership of this mailing list is shaping up, since I know most of you (at least, I know your online presence), and I'm reasonably sure that most of y'all have both programming chops and voting science chops, which is the exact set of folks that I was hoping to see. Please: invite your friends!
Perhaps posting something on Reddit's endfptp or votingtheory could encourage people to join; I think they're somewhat more simulation-focused than people on the EM list, or at least that's been my impression. has the There may be other forums too; I think CES has one? And there's https://www.votingtheory.org/, though I think it might be kinda dead.
Also, I'm hoping y'all can all give some advice on moderation policy here. Over at the election-methods list, there were a couple of folks that became very unpopular over the past few months. I won't go into details, but at least one of them left in a huff because I sent them a private email that they found disagreeable (or rather, they want to unsubscribe, but also seem to want white-glove service on a self-service mailing list). Then the other problematic member complained on-list about my private email. It's a little emotionally taxing on me to have to send behavioral emails to members (letting them know just how unpopular they are), and thus, I like mathematical rules for this type of thing.
The way it usually goes (on forums where I've been posting/lurking at least) is that someone lets the admin know if someone else is making trouble, and then the admin looks at things and decides whether to do something about it.
Maybe it would feel less taxing if you had some intermediate measures, like temporary bans or cooldown periods instead of the only choice being either letting them continue or kicking them out.
But if it's writing behavioral mails of any kind that's taxing, then that wouldn't help, of course. In that case, there's another problem. If the votes are public, then the voters might not want to be the ones pointing the finger at anyone either.
But if the votes *aren't* public, then someone would still have to look at the private votes and say "you're unpopular because x people think you're making a mess of the list". You'd still have to write a behavioral mail, it would just be "I can kick you off the list since x people think you're being obnoxious" instead of "I can kick you off the list since I heard some people complain and I think they're right". I'm not sure how much that would buy you.
My question: assuming this list doesn't lurk in obscurity forever, on the undesirable but probably inevitable occasion that we have a problematic member of the list (or two, or three, or five people who don't play nice with one another), what should we do about it?
The informal way would be: have people who object send you mail, then you make a judgement call.
If you're going to do a vote of no confidence instead, my idea would be something like:
If someone complains to you about a user, ask the list to send you their F candidates. If a candidate gets enough Fs, kick him (or do some temporary measure).
While it's nice to know who the A and C users are, it's not really relevant to a no confidence vote.
I still think the informal method is better, though :-)
-km
participants (2)
-
Kristofer Munsterhjelm -
Rob Lanphier