XSF Discussion - 2020-11-25

lskdjf: thanks I see

In the Agenda I just use the template which we used forever. We can get rid of the NO column for board and council votes

emus: ya, we can add a section to the newsletter, I can work on it

Alex: ok cool

Alex: yes, as this seemingly just counts how much havent placed a vote for them I think its misleading. Id rather say how many peoplr voted, and then place the table with number of votes per person.

The label might be slightly misleading but I do find that information useful

Even though you can of course derive it by subtracting the yeses from the total

Maybe not necessarily for the news letter tho (I just realized that you were probably talking about that)

Daniel: I was talking about the wiki page. But I dont see the sense of placing the no if the only user action is to place a vote for people. In general election also place only who voted for one, not how many did not vote for him. (right?)

emus, I think you need at least half of the votes in addition to being in the top 5

so listing the No column also makes it clear whether that criterium is fulfilled or not

> Third, the individuals elected shall be those receiving the highest percentage of votes cast, up to the limit set by the Members and with the proviso that no individual receiving less than a majority of votes cast shall be elected.

though....

oh my

The lack of possibility to vote yes/no/absent explicitly actually can have real world consequences. Should we ever end up with significantly more candidates than number of votes you have, many will not make the 50% limit.

larma, That's be a lovely problem to have, mind.

I’m also fairly certain that we’re doing it wrong

reading Section 3.13

Section 3.13 Voting Procedure for Election of Board and Council. Election of individuals to serve on the Board of Directors and on the XMPP Council shall proceed as follows. First, the number of individuals to serve on each body shall be limited beforehand by the Members as specified in Section 4.4 and Section 8.1 of these Bylaws for the Board and Council, respectively. Second, the Members shall vote on the candidates standing for election in accordance with Section 3.9 of these Bylaws. Third, the individuals elected shall be those receiving the highest percentage of votes cast, up to the limit set by the Members and with the proviso that no individual receiving less than a majority of votes cast shall be elected. Fourth, in the case of a tie for the final remaining position, the final individual shall be chosen in accordance with the procedures defined in “RFC 3797: Publicly Verifiable Nominations Committee (NomCom) Random Selection” published by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

nothing in here says that we can only cast N (= number of seats) votes

The vote was rigged!

Section 3.9 just says that each member gets a single vote: > Section 3.9 Voting. Each current Member of the Corporation (other than Emeritus Members) shall be entitled to one (1) vote on each matter submitted to a vote at a meeting of the Members, except as may otherwise be provided in the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware.

that was a rabbit hole I did not want to discover

> emus, I think you need at least half of the votes in addition to being in the top 5 > so listing the No column also makes it clear whether that criterium is fulfilled or not But dont you need the total number of person voted for this criterium?

emus, that is Yes + No

😄

true

Okay. but then I would place the total number directly, because it looks like "No" is an active choice ✏

emus, FWIW, it used to be an active choice - the memberbot used to just ask yes/no for each candidate, so you could (and people did) vote for 4, or 6, people. I'm happy to look into changing the memberbot back to doing that, though obviously I'd raise this with Board and Alex (as Secretary) first.

dwd, from my reading of the Bylaws, the previous mode you describe is the one which matches the bylaws

while the current mode does not

I understand one have maximum 5 vote options. Sure, one might not vote for everyone, but that is an abstention not a "No"-vote or vote against one (as I first interpreted the table)

emus, I do not understand that from the Bylaws

emus, Well, as jonas’ says, there's no "maximum number of votes" mentioned in the bylaws.

recount! recount!

But I thought board and council are limited to 5 persons each

yes

but the voting scheme still says you vote yes/no (abstain?) for each candidate

and then the five with the highest ratio of yes votes get the seats

> emus, FWIW, it used to be an active choice - the memberbot used to just ask yes/no for each candidate, so you could (and people did) vote for 4, or 6, people. I'm happy to look into changing the memberbot back to doing that, though obviously I'd raise this with Board and Alex (as Secretary) first. It may match the bylaws but I find that odd. If anything I'd prefer switching to ranked choice or something

which is different from "you select 5 candidates which counts +1 for each and the five with the highest number of +1 get the seats"

emus, Sure. But - arguably - that could be found by everyone voting uniformly for every candidate and then randomly selecting via RFC 3797.

Daniel, agreed, ranked choice would be better than either system (but also much more complex to evaluate)

^^

nevertheless: I think we do have a massive legal issue if our voting procedure diverges from what the Bylaws say

Maybe Im just a bit confused

> nevertheless: I think we do have a massive legal issue if our voting procedure diverges from what the Bylaws say I guess this should be discussed first

by whom?

the possibly not-legally-elected board? :-) ✏

🤷‍♂️

Because if I _could_ vote +1 for each I either have to make an active choice not to vote someone in or just give anyone a +1. On the other hand if I only have 5 votes in total its just a 'I prefer x over z' instead of an 'I hate x'

Alex?

Daniel, that’d give some higher weight to the people who *do* make an active choice instead of just selecting the first five people memberbot comes up with

jonas’, Given the Board couldn't have changed given a yes/no vote, it's Council are are potentially not legit, but still. :-)

dwd, true

> Daniel, that’d give some higher weight to the people who *do* make an active choice instead of just selecting the first five people memberbot comes up with Well that's just an argument for making it random

dwd, though the bylaw voting scheme does encourage no votes more than the current one

In any event, as I say I'm happy to raise this at Board.

Daniel, it is random already :)

jonas’: one can randomise the listing^^

dwd, good :)

emus, see above :)

ah

emus, The listing *is* randomized already.

dwd, will you be part of council?

yep good

jonas’, Seems so. I was expecting to be voted off, actually, but I'm happy I've not been. We'll need someone else to act as Liaision to Board though, otherwise I'll have conflicts in meetingts, but ordinarily that's the Council Chair anyway, and I'm hoping you'll continue that.

dwd, ok

emus: in meetings all day, will read here later when I am available

sure

oh neat. So if I understood that, the system we're supposed to have where you could just vote for everybody is called 'approval voting'. It's my favorite voting system and I always wondered why we modified it and limited you to 5 votes

Although I also thought we used a modified ranked choice too and that the order mattered just because memberbot seems to suggest it does, but I guess thinking back obviously that wasn't true because the results didn't show that ever. Not sure why I never realized that.

Am I reading https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0124.html#terminate correct like this? "When a client sends 'terminate', the server should not deliver any stanzas any longer"

FWIW "approval voting" and "condorcet voting" would be my favorites when it comes to voting for council and board (with a slight tendency towards condorcet)

Guus, good question, I am not that much into BOSH, but I somehow would expect BOSH's 'terminate' to mimic </stream>, so it would be a unidirectional close

Guus, in any way, this could probably be clarified in xep124

flow that was kind of my thinking (eg, I expected the server to be able to deliver a pending message or echo presence unavailalble), but that's not how I read this.

TIL: condorcet voting, this sounds neat (if a bit complicated to understand and implement compared to approval voting which seems pretty intuitive)

Guus, also note that a client couldn’t assume that it won’t receive stanzas anymore, latency and all.

SamWhited, ideally you can use a condorcet voting library instead of impl the whole thing. Understanding is a bit different, approval voting is far easier to understand. But OTOH condorcet voting is already used in tech communities (e.g. Debian, Jenkins)

the stackexchange network also does condorcet voting (if I am not mistaken)

I didn't mean implement in terms of memberbot, I just meant "making the whole thing work and understood and contingencies for ties within an organization", sorry

I see

Maybe it doesn't matter since what we have now is effectively approval voting but with ties already taken care of. Probably no need to change what isn't broken.

Interesting to think about though

Ties aren't taken care of, are they?

Or not by the voting mechanism itself, at least.

more-than-5-way-ties, I mean. If we have a tie in the top 5 it doesn't matter, but with regular approval voting if there are 6 candidates for 5 positions and all voters approve of all candidates you have to figure out what to do

Actually, no, you're right, doesn't matter, we could still have a tie for 5th place, for example. Ignore me.

So we have approval voting with a weird restriction that I still don't fully understand :)

I updated our Agenda page and removed the No votes which memberbot is counting by default. Please take a look here: https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Meeting-Minutes-2020-11-24

SamWhited: My tickets are here :) - https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/created_by/Neustradamus + This ticket here but not solved: https://github.com/xsf/xeps/issues/966 ✏

Neustradamus: I don't have anything to do with that and can't help, sorry.

Also, reading the question, that issue *was* solved. The editors tried to explain how it's not a problem it looks like.

About the voting process. When there are any concerns then I would ask you to bring it to the member list for dicsussion. We are using the process as is for over a decade now. Which does not mean that there are still areas where we can learn, adjust and improve.

Alex: voting process seems fine, I don't think anyone is seriously talking about wanting to change it (although I can't speak for everyone of course). Just a fun discussion about how different voting systems would work :)

SamWhited: https://github.com/xsf/xmpp.org/issues/421?

"Proponents of Condorcet can't decide on anything anyways" :P

Neustradamus: I don't understand what you're asking or what you want me to do. I am not an editor.

SamWhited: it is linked to your ticket here: https://github.com/xsf/xeps/issues/992 :)

I know. I still don't understand what you're asking or what you want me to do.

SamWhited: just wanna make sure that all voices are heard. And when there are concerns that we discuss them, and not just silently ignore 😉

Indeed; thanks for doing that, and for continuing to do the elections and meetings and what not!

hey guys

is ther anyone here ?

i need help

to add someone n this site

but idk how