Hi folks,

As some of you may know, I've been hosting a monthly "office hours" call every Tuesday at 2pm Pacific: https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Tuesday_at_2

It's often a small crowd and seldom more than show up for Sass's weekly call: https://electowiki.org/wiki/Sass_Open_Democracy_Discussion

One semi-regular attendee at my monthly call is Kristofer Musterhjelm, though he's not the only electoral-reform person who has dropped by. The conversation on my call frequently gets DEEP in the weeds with respect to oddball corner cases when elections can go off the rails (as well as the interplay between geography and democracy, and other math-y/computer-y topics). It also sometimes ends up being a bit of a gossip session about the various people in the electoral reform movement, though I sometimes feel guilty for letting it go that way. Sometimes.

Anyway, things can get a little awkward when alumni from Wikimedia Foundation or other former co-workers and friends/family of mine show up, because I can suddenly lose interest in talking about electoral.reform stuff (especially if it's someone I haven't seen in a while). Folks that I know from electoral reform stuff frequently want to talk about mathematical concepts that I barely understand, let alone my friends who haven't been mildly aware of many of these concepts for the past 30+ years. Also, Kristofer (and probably other Europeans) would like a time for the call that doesn't involve staying up until way-too-late to attend. My "Tuesday at 2" time was chosen because it VERY VAGUELY works for folks in western Europe, the US west coast, and Australia (among others), but rumor has it the globe is spherical, and there are times that suck for some folks in the global electoral community. Who knew?

I see the community of folks that subscribe to this list (who I'll refer to as the "Electorama community") as the target audience for this call. Kristofer is less cardinal-tolerant than I am, and thus also doesn't want to stay up until 3am to talk to folks who tend to be biased toward cardinal methods (as many folks on Sass's call are). Though I find STAR to be an acceptable (even "very good") reform, Condorcet methods are my first love, and I find myself "flipping the idiot bit" on people who make specious arguments against Condorcet tallying (even if I don't say so out loud). Given how much many cardinal advocates like to hear the sound of their own voice and how often they make said specious arguments (mistaking "assertiveness" for "correctness"), I find myself frequently biting my tongue/stepping away from the keyboard when I read/hear their arguments.

I've been promising Kristofer I'd send this email for weeks if not months now. I've been dragging my feet because I'm ambivalent about having another periodic call that I feel semi-obligated to attend. I'm hoping if we have another call, it'll be complementary to Sass's weekly call (not explicitly competitive to it). I'm not sure if the Electorama call should be weekly, fortnightly, monthly or some other time increment. For now, let's assume this will be fortnightly (i.e. every other week), but let's use when2meet to come to initial consensus: https://www.when2meet.com/?32866470-TyG8q

Note that the host (me, for now) gets to choose the time, regardless what the vote on when2meet is. I've created a temporary electowiki page here for this call: https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/Electorama_call

If you're interested in joining this call, please let your opinion be known at the when2meet link above. when2meet is optimized for weekly meetings, but this is only a straw to get vague availability for everyone. I was very liberal about the times I said that I'm available, but I imagine if the group consensus seems to be at an awful time for me, I may ask someone else to host the call. We can use the "Talk:" page for the "User:RobLa/Electorama_call" page to discuss whether this should be weekly, fortnightly, or monthly.

TIA! Rob