Re: [gentoo-dev] Council polls now open

[Ferris McCormick <fmccor@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 2006-08-10 at 21:49 +0200, Danny van Dyk wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, 10. August 2006 18:51 schrieb Grant Goodyear:
> > Olivier Crete wrote: [Thu Aug 10 2006, 11:42:14AM CDT]
> >
> > > On Thu, 2006-10-08 at 10:57 -0500, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> > > I volunteer (again).. What's the status on the search for voting
> > > software ?
> >
> > Well, fmccor has suggested STV[1], so the current plan is to use
> > "countify" to assemble the usual master ballot, and then write some
> > sort of glue script that will take the master ballot and transform
> > it into whatever STV needs.  Of course, the glue bit still needs to
> > be written.
> Hm, i see a problem here. IIRC STV expects one line of input per ballot, 
> which lists all candidates sperated by spaces. Now, per votifiy, 
> developers can put more than one developer per line, if they deem them 
> to be equally competent. Isn't that incompatible behaviour?
> 

Yes, but if we use STV (and there are issues with it if Condorcet is a
requirement, because Condorcet is really designed to pick one winner,
and it takes some extra work to get a ranking), I have a tiny ruby
script which can take any number of raw ballots and convert them into
one (internal form) STV .blt file.  (The "equally competent" part might
be another problem with STV, but I have to go back and look at it
carefully to verify that.)

So the "glue" is rather easy; problem is the specific balloting method.
STV supports several protocols for selecting some number of winners from
a list of candidates, but Condorcet is not among them, because Condorcet
is really a "pick single winner" method.

(By the way, if the ballots from council2005 are still around, and if
someone can make them anonymous (convert names to something like C1, C2,
etc.), I can take them and show what results STV would give, if you'd
like a controlled test.)

Anyone having better information than I have, please correct my mistakes
here.

> Danny
> -- 
> Danny van Dyk <kugelfang@gentoo.org>
> Gentoo/AMD64 Project, Gentoo Scientific Project

Regards,
Ferris
-- 
Ferris McCormick (P44646, MI) <fmccor@gentoo.org>
Developer, Gentoo Linux (Devrel, Sparc)


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