[Elections] Re: Who votes? how does voting work?

[Lex Spoon]

It is clear to everyone, I think, that the current set of SqP-certified
people does not correspond to the set who should get to vote.  So we
can't "just use SqP".  Many people seem interested in somehow improving
the system so that it would generate a reasonable list of members.

Before telling you my reservations, please remember that the object-list
approach is about as KISS and as reliable as imaginable.  People would
sign up on a wiki page if they think they should get a vote, and there
would be a time period where people can challenge entries on the page. 
Assuming everyone plays nice, then within a few weeks -- a month tops --
there would be a list of members that could be frozen as the initial
set.  This would be a list that everyone should feel good about, because
the rules of joining are objective and because the membership
applications are all handled publicly.

That said, there are a number of problems with using an automatic
reputation system for something as fundamental as membership.  People
should not go for such a system unless they are comfortable with all of
these issues.

A big open question is who are the roots?  I asked later but no one has
responded.  The only objective group I could think of would be to let
Alan Kay choose (or, almost equivalently, to make him the only root). 
Assuming he does not suddenly jump into the fray with the open source
community, what else is there?  The question has to be answered, and it
needs to be answered in a way that does not leave out entire chunks of
the community.  What do the pro-repsystem people want to choose, here?

Second, have people really thought about what it would be like to live
under such a system?  Membership would be granted and denied based on a
dozen or more off-the-cuff reviews instead of 1-3 careful ones.  That's
a recipe for superficial decisions -- it will promote populists over
quiet doers.  Also, reviews would not be archived.  People would not
have a place to post their *reason* for their certifications.  And they
cannot post negative reviews at all, right now.  (Even if they could,
who would put their neck out to do it?)  On top of these, don't people
worry that a reputation system includes people who pester a lot of
members but excludes shier folks who do not want to do that?



Issues aside, there is the question of practical experience.  Aside from
communities where people pay to join, or where membership is wide open
to all comers, practically every community I know of uses the
defense-before-committee approach.  It is not perfect, but it seems to
work well, and it is something that people understand.  In particular,
it handily addresses all of the issues in the previous paragraph.  Is
there any experience we can rely on for using reputation systems to
define membership?  Maybe some of the worries from the previous
paragraph do not emerge in practice? 

I honestly don't know.  I just believe that, aside from evidence to the
contrary, we ought to keep it simple and use a tried and true solution.


-Lex