[Mmwg] Electing the second co-chair : a Suggestion

Fri Feb 10 10:06:10 GMT 2006

Dear all,

Congratulations to Karen. I also wish  to add my congratulations to you all as well. Although I had not actively participated in the discussions, I have been observing them through all your emails. 

The success of these elections are a tribute to the good will, good faith, humility, volunteering spirit, and desire to work with others you all showed. This, in my humble opinion, makes Karen's success the success of all. It is also testimony to how formidable the collective desire to work together can be. I look forward to more of the same and you can always count on my support.

Warmest,

Khaled Fattal
Chairman & CEO, MINC

Date: Wed, 8 Feb 2006 17:12:39 +0100From: bdelachapelle at gmail.comTo: avri at acm.oargCC: Subject: [Mmwg] Electing the second co-chair : a Suggestion
Congrats to Jacqueline. And thanks a lot to Avri for getting us going.

On what to do next for the selection of a second co-chair, I am OK for endorsing Wolfgang if there is a consensus but would prefer a second round to be set up. 

I only identify a potential problem in the latter case. If we are allowed to cast only one vote, there is no guarantee that anyone will get 2/3 of the votes. Votes could be distributed evenly among the three remaining candidates for instance (each one third). Of course we could count on a momentum in favor of the leading candidate (in this case Wolfgang) and be out of trouble, but this is not guaranteed by the mechanism. And we should try to identify mechanisms that automatically produces a predictable result. 

I therefore propose the following modality that will guarantee that we have at least one candidate reaching 2/3 of the votes. We just need to maintain the possibility to choose 2 names in the remaining list of 3. As there are only three possibilites to vote (A and B, A and C and B and C if the three candidates are A, B and C), the whole group will necessarily split into three clusters (those voting for A and B, those for A and C, and those for B and C) and two clusters will necessarily represent more than 2/3 of the total together. Hence, if the two groups forming this 2/3 majority together have voted for instance respectively for A-B and B-C, candidate B - and he/she alone - will mathematically enjoy a 2/3 majority. 

The only case where this mechanism would not produce a solution is if :
- the number of people casting a vote is a multiple of 3 (any non multiple is OK) 
- AND the group has split evenly among the candidates (ie : combinations A-B, A-C and B-C have all gathered 1/3 of the members)

In all other cases, the system produces a clear result. And even in the above case, a rule could be established to attribute the seat to the candidate that gathered the most votes in the previous round. 

So, in order to make myself clear, I suggest :
- that we keep the three candidates
- that we allow a second round with the possibility to cast two votes
- that in case the number of people voting is a multiple of 3 and the votes are evenly distributed, Wolfgang (who got the most votes in the first round) is given the seat. 

Apart from producing a clear result in all cases I believe this mechanism would be interesting to explore further and I would be very happy if it could be tested here. 

We will be confronted in the near future with many occurences for selecting people as chairs, grooup coordinators or members of various committees. I believe this opens a way to innovate and find modalities that will designate people that can be endorsed by the broadest majority, avoiding the too frequent outcome of traditional majority voting that produces victories with 50,01 % of the votes and a split among constituents ("my candidate won, yours lost" ...). 

I hope this helps. 

Do not hesitate to correct me if my calculations are wrong. 

Best

Bertrand

On 2/8/06, Avri Doria <avri at acm.org> wrote: 
Hi,Ok, I believe that at this point, the election of the co-chairs haveended.22 out of 35 people voted. The results:David Allen  (8 votes) - 36% of those votingRobert Guerra  18.18% - (8 votes) - 36% of those votingWolfgang Kleinwachter (12 votes)  55% of those votingJacqueline Morris  (16 votes) 73% of those voting By the requirements in the charter it takes 2/3 (67%) vote to beelected.So Jacqueline is definitely elected as one of the two co-chairs.Congratulations and thanks.At this point, while Wolfgang has a majority vote, he does not have 67%. Aand I am not sure what to do.  Do we need to have a runoff election,or is there a chance we can reach consensus.  Please let the listknow.  In the meantime, Jacqueline is a chair of the group.  And ifshe (and the groups) wants I will assist her while we are trying toresolve the co-chair issue.-------Obviously, this first experiment at voting leaves some learning to bedone.  In addition to not having reached a full 2/3 on the vote for one of the candidates, I received some other comments.- Instead of forcing everyone to vote for 2 people perhaps it shouldhave been set up for up to 2 votes.- should be using open source facilities instead of a .com commercial facility.  Note I could not find any open source based facility butwould surely prefer to have used such a system.- people's passwords should have been auto-generated instead of mysending them out to people.  I do assure you all that I did not abuse my having access to all the passwords.  Also, for their to be auto-generation of passwords, it would have been necessary to give outpeople's email addresses, which opens up a spam risk.  This should bediscussed further. - I should have included candidate biographic information for thosewho don't know everyone.- Nomination process should have been clearer and more formalizedThese comments are all valid and merit discussion, especially in terms of any recommendations the Wg might make that include votingmechanisms for any of the follow-on mechanisms.thanks to all those who voted and commented.a.ex MMWG coordinator_______________________________________________mmwg mailing listmmwg at wsis-cs.orghttp://mailman-new.greennet.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/mmwg 
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