On Sun, 14 Nov 2004, Frank Ellermann wrote:
william(at)elan.net wrote:
initial responses from my today's poll show quite clearly
that:
...you interpret your own polls as it pleases you. That's the
nature of polls and nothing special. I don't bother to check
your interpretation based on less than 10 participants.
Interpretation does not apply here, I asked questions directly and
included all the choices about who should vote that were previously
discussed on the list and the first two (i.e. all those who have posted
on spf-discuss or everyone who is on spf-discss) are the ones that people
are choosing so far. So limiting to one month or two month or whatever as
johnp for his own reasons decided to do is not representative of the
community and he had no right to make this choice in the first place as
I tried to tell him.
procedures that can insure openness of the process and
insures that results can be verified by anybody on the list
Generations of dorks tried to sabotage Usenet CfVs, and most
often they failed. In Usenet each vote (by mail to the RO)
is confirmed by mail. If the confirmation bounces, the vote
is discarded (in Usenet all you need is a valid mail address).
The votes are published. If somebody sees errors (or abuse)
he's free to challenge the result.
I don't consider Usenet to be a well setup system - it "barely" works
but they way it works exactly fits its participants expectations too (and
this is all well beyond topic of SPF, so lets not dig deep into this topic)
Nevertheless the process there is quite open despite all the possible
problems that may exist because of it.
This procedure has some obvious loopholes, but nevertheless
it generally works. Here we have no loopholes, if somebody
tries to vote with several fake identities John will see it
based on Wayne's published lists, X-checked against GMaNe's
public archive if necessary (GMaNe offers search by group and
address simultaneously)
John should not be doing it himself, he can coordinate but actual vote
should happen on independent media channel.
And if John doesn't see it "we" will see it in the result and
howl and holler. The same sort of public control will catch
all errors. Only in the worst case (if somebody intentionally
tries to sabotage the vote) this procedure has to be repeated
with stricter rules.
I'm not interested in dragging the process
Apparently you're more interested in a Usenet crash course (?)
Actually I'm not very interested in turning SPF into usenet at all.
I'm however interested in making sure the voting procesures do not
discrimenate and that only limits that we as a groop agreed to
actually are used (and the only way to agree to limits is to adapt a
charter and rules of conduct of spf organization activities and to do
this we need to have list of people who can work it out first).
I just don't think you understand what open process means
and that includes that you would not make rules that restrict
the process
The process _must_ be restricted, "we" (tinw) don't want to
send copies of our passports with digitized fingerprints for a
simple vote, but "we" also don't want a flood of fakes.
I consider restriction based on user's participation on spf-discuss, i.e.
at least one post - to be the most natural one. Anything more then that
severely restricts participation in the voting without agreement of the
whole SPF community first.
It is impossible to create perfect and self-protected system
immediatly.
s/immediatly// For less than perfect solutions it's useless
to reinvent the wheel, your "4 e" or a similar rule would do
the trick. It's a feature if the RO has some leeway to handle
potential abuse.
4e may well be the best way to conduct future elections, but the point is
that its not they way to do the first election as we dont have consensus
of the community about it and Johnp can not make decisions like that on
his own.
Same goes for him unilaterly deciding that spf council will serve for one
year, etc.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net