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

[Daniel Vainsencher]

Before we start the point by point phase, something positive:

Lex Spoon wrote:
 > 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.
I don't know, I think SqP can save us lots of ugly work by making trust 
transitive. Its already implemented. It seems to have built in safeguard 
limiting the amount of damage a single person can do. And I sort of like 
the fact that its new, heck, we might learn something from it.

> 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.  
Agreed.

> So we
> can't "just use SqP".  
This does not follow - creating new accounts on SqP is almost as easy as 
adding your name to a wiki page. Do you already have a wiki page with 
all the voter names?

Converting SqP accounts to voters is much easier than converting 
names-on-a-wiki into voters - SqP already has the interfaces for 
certification, query for voter list and so forth. A wiki starts with no 
structure. If you add it up front, that's work to be done. If you don't, 
you'll get a mess, and work harder later.

> Many people seem interested in somehow improving
> the system so that it would generate a reasonable list of members.
There is currently no evidence that any code improvements are necessary 
at all. It is quite possible that the only thing it lacks is use, and 
when people know that it matters, they'll certify.

Lex, all of the above, I've said about 3 times on this list now. Are you 
not seeing this?

> Before telling you my reservations, please remember that the object-list
> approach is about as KISS and as reliable as imaginable.
Lets see...

>  People would
> sign up on a wiki page if they think they should get a vote, 
Simple so far.

> and there
> would be a time period where people can challenge entries on the page. 
So by default, everyone gets in, because if I don't know someone, I'm 
certainly not going to call him a lier, right?

> 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.  
Whoa! when did that happen? what usually happens on a wiki page is that 
any initial structure is used, overloaded and then starts crumbling. In 
this case, I expect a list of people that put themselves up and are 
ignored because nobody knows them. Some of them put up excuses that 
someone chooses to challenge by asking a couple of questions. Half of 
those questions are answered. Which of those entries are in? who decides 
that?

> 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.
So far we have a wiki page with persons names, and a list of rules about 
their accomplishments. How are these matched? do people list their 
accomplishments? do they provide a link so people can verify it? do they 
just write the number of the rule that they believe they should be 
accepted under? I'm not sure what you mean by someone "feeling good" 
about it. I get the feeling that membership is so open as to be 
meaningless. Anyone can write themselves in, verification is usually 
impossible, therefore won't be done. The applications happen publically, 
but I'm not at all sure in what sense they are handled - seems like they 
are simply collected.

> 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). 
In what sense you call that objective?

> Assuming he does not suddenly jump into the fray with the open source
> community, what else is there?  
First - what already exists. True, this is an arbitrary set of roots, 
but until we find out that someone that has an account, and is a serious 
user of Squeak can't get certified because the roots are insufficient, 
there is no problem.

That said...

> 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?
I think that the criterion for adding roots should be "heads of 
communities" (AK is the prime example, of course). I think this 
criterion should be judged by votes of the existing voter body.

> 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.
I don't know where you are taking these assumptions. Numerically, very 
few certifications seem to be sufficient: only KenC and I have certified 
Peter, and he got the certification we gave him. As to the quality of 
the reviews, why exactly should I review more carefully on a wiki page 
than on SqP?

>  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.
Of course they do - SqP provides you with some web space, and from a 
person I can go to the pages of his certifiers. The "reviews" would be 
archived whenever someone bothers to write them (probably rarely). Note 
that explicit reviews are really not that important an idea in a web of 
trust. The transitivity takes care of it. If you trust me enough to read 
my reviews, just certify me, and the juice will pass on to those I certify.

>  And they
> cannot post negative reviews at all, right now.
They can. No negative certifications, that's all. But why do we need those?

>  (Even if they could,
> who would put their neck out to do it?)  
If I know some new comer is a cheat, why shouldn't I mail his certifiers 
and mention the problem? assuming I have trust from people that are not 
dependent on his certifiers, what's to stop me?

> 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?
If I get pestered, I might certify someone who I'd otherwise ignore, but 
you think I would certify them high? and can you please explain in 
comparison what would happen in a wiki based system? sounds to me I can 
pester people to vouch for me in any medium.

Daniel