Range Voting

[kevin_standlee]

The folks advocating Range Voting contacted WSFS (actually, the WSFS webmaster, sfrose) lobbying WSFS to change its voting system from the Instant Runoff Voting system we currently use for site selection and the Hugo Awards. Sharon told them how our rules work and suggested that if they want to change them, they come to WSFS business meetings and propose and debate the changes there, like all other rule changes. The advocate's response, in my opinion, amounted to, "Our proposal is so obviously Right that we shouldn't have to do all that hard, expensive work. You should change your rules because we tell you to do so."

I often tell people who come to me with rules-change proposals, "If you think it's worthwhile, come and submit it yourself. I'll help you with all of the technicalities to the best of my ability, but you have to make your own case, lobby people yourself, and get the votes by convincing people." Most of the time, this discourages them -- democracy is hard work! But sometimes we get people who are willing to work and debate, and sometimes we even get workable changes and improvements.

WSFS rules are intentionally designed to be resistant to change; however, they can be changed if people work hard enough at it. But it's not enough to just lobby a Board of Directors or subvert the Chairman; you have to convince the members.

Comments

[merlinpole.livejournal.com]

Have you ever done any actual market research, including interviewing people and discussing that semantics make a huge difference, that while Person A might say, "we don't do any of that here," Person B who works ten feet away from Person A, is actually working on what Person A hasn't got a clue is being worked on in the company... it's not that what Person A is working on is any secret, it's that Person B is narrowly focused on Person B's specialty and doesn't notice anything outside that specialty or have a "systems approach." Most people don't. Or, after fifteen minutes of discussion, it comes out that Person C who said, "No, I don't work on any of that," is working on it, but doesn't think of what he or she is working on, as being of that ilk... that's the reason why e.g. the same equation gets called different names in different fields--it's the same math equation, but most people don't go cross-discipline research to notice that one can e.g. copy a solution to a problem in fluid mechanics from an electromagnetism text. Electrical engineers and programmers in particular tend to draw boxes or the code equivalent and jump down into them and never look outside the box... there was the day I was looking at a design and said to the EEs, "if these two boxes are supposed to be talking to one another there's a problem. One of them has four lines and the other five."

"Which do you want, four or five?" they asked me. "I don't care if it's four or five, I want the same number of lines on each [so that the I/O matches up]."