spf-discuss
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RE: Open council and project issues

2004-12-18 11:43:35

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Julian Mehnle wrote:

For voting, I think either Approval or Condorcet will work fine [...]
What I'm however concerned is possibility of large organization
(commercial or otherwise) asking its members/employers to join SPF in
order to advance certain candidate(s) - with large enough base of
additional people not even Condorcet will stop them from gaining the
majority.

Well, whenever groups of people are engaged in democratic elections,
there's always the risk of being "taken over".  I think a good solution to
that would be to require voters to register themselves a month or two in
advance of the election.

Same thing - those who want to take over will register month or two prior
to elections :) 
 
As such [...] I recommend that for this purpose you establish a new
body (i.e. "election commission") which goal is to supervise elections
and approve list of candidates - my recommendation is that it be small
(say 3 people) and that it be randomly composed of people who NOBODY
else at SPF Community has problems with.

The electoral committee appears to me as a good idea, and I'd have
suggested 3 people for it as well.  I also can roughly agree with the
procedure you suggested for their selection, with some exceptions:

 1. If you remove candidates simply because someone raises an objection,
    you open yourself to "DoS" attacks from outside.

If you let everyone into the commision you end up with possibility of it
being taken over as well (even if randomly chosen with large number of
people from outside volunteering chances are they'll be on it). The whole
point is that you let people see who wants to be on it and if they know
the person to be true to the SPF goals and be able to properly decide
on the same about candidates, then there would be no objections. And
the idea is also to have comission composed of people who are not on
the "edge" and are more neutral in their positions (those would not
be likely to be objected to).

As far as DoS attack, I thought of that and that is the reason why I said
that each person has right to only ask for removal of one canidate. But 
if that ever happens that some group is deliberately not letting comission
form, I believe then the rules should specify that previous year commission
should be asked to coninue and new chosen council can then decide to change
the rules to prevent such fillibuster with comission from happening again.
 
 2. The electoral committee shouldn't be able to veto candidates for the
    council on arbitrary grounds.  I think the committee should be
    restricted to formal decisions.

I agree, there should be some rules that it should follow when evaluating 
candidates and their qualifications. But I also think it should have 
fairly strong powers to be able to protect spf community from takeover
and that requires for example being able to not accept candidate who is
not active in SPF Community or has been active only for very short time.

-- 
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net