Forum:Changes to the Weird Gloop elections

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This thread was archived on 12 September 2021 by Haidro.

Hi everyone,

Last election we had an interesting situation where the number of people running in the election was equal to the number of elected members we must have every electoral term. Most of the wiki community didn’t feel comfortable knowing that all 7 people who ran in the election would be elected without any vote. Currently, in the event of a tie the election committee may rule on it or create policies to handle ties (23.11).

Since we haven’t experienced this before and had no rules set up on what to do, a temporary solution was to “upvote/downvote” nominees, and those under 50% would not be elected. This worked out fine since no one was under 50%, but again we were unprepared in the event of someone not meeting the threshold and the board failing to have 7 elected members. There are a few scenarios we don’t have any official guidelines on:

  1. What should we do if less than 3 people (1 in the event of PT-BR) elect to represent a wiki?
  2. Should we change our voting method to consider the situation when exactly 3 people elect to represent a wiki?
  3. What should we do if we fail to elect 3 wiki-representatives in an election (e.g., from a voting method that would elect some members but not others)?

Note that 7 members (3 RS, 3 OSRS, 1 PT-BR) is a fixed number. The number can change via a resolution, but we do need a number (23.5), or we change the article to be more flexible.

Some situations & solutions

There are a lot of ways we can tackle this. I’ll put down some ideas, but if anyone has any other ideas, please bring them up! Whatever consensus is reached, the board will vote on it.

1. Less than 3 people elect to represent a wiki

  1. Change the number of elected members to be equal to the amount of people that ran.
  2. Delay the election by a short while and attract more people to run. By article 23.3, we must have an election within 13 months of the last. We can change this though.

2. Voting method if exactly 3 people run

  1. None. Let everyone who runs be elected without voting.
  2. “50% threshold vote via upvote/downvote”. What we did last year.
  3. Introduce a “vote of no confidence” per wiki and keep Schulze method. If you’re not confident in one person at all (but are with the other two), you can vote for a 4th “no confidence” slot, and that one person wouldn’t be elected. The advantage of this voting method over the previous one is that it’s extensible for more than 3 people.

3. Failing to elect 3 members to represent a wiki

Note that a couple of solutions in the previous section would still have the problem where we could fail to elect the number of members required for a given wiki.

  1. Change the number of elected members to be equal to the amount of people that passed the election.
  2. Same as above, but have another election in a month’s time to try and reach 7 total members (3 RS, 3 OSRS, 1 PT-BR), and then reverting the number of elected members back to 7.

Haidro (talk) 08:48, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Discussion

Comment - There's two points I have:

  • Regardless of how many candidates we have, it is important for the community to be able to confirm their suitability. This applies whether we have too many or too few candidates for a given role. If we do not have enough successful candidates after the vote, I'm comfortable with that assuming the people that were wildly unsuitable were not elected. To that end, I think we need some sort of veto option that should be factored in the results somehow.
  • If we end up with too few successful candidates and we feel this number is insufficient for proper operation of the board, having a smaller scale election seems perfectly reasonable. Similarly, if a board member steps down for any reason, I think another election should be triggered. I would note that pt-br have circumvented any sort of obviously open process in both the initial election and the recent replacement, so I'm unsure if this suggestion is excessively bureaucratic.

cqm talk 10:55, 6 May 2021 (UTC)

Request for closure - Due to lack of responses from the community, I believe that we can close this and come up with the solution during the next board meeting. This is something that can be discussed and then shared with the greater community afterwards. --Legaia 2 Pla ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ 13:51, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Closed - Per above. --Legaia 2 Pla ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ 23:57, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

Reopened - Because this issue isn't solved yet. Board will be discussing this matter in the upcoming meeting (Forum:Upcoming board meeting August 2021). I won't be attending the meeting because of timezone differences but I left up some notes for the board to discuss, which I'll relay here:

Cam’s sentiment is that people should have a say on everyone running, regardless of how many people overall are running in the election. I agree with it and would be surprised if anyone disagreed.

We need a new way to vote that can elect only the members we want to elect, regardless of the minimum number of members required. Cam proposes there should be a way to veto members [how?]. Isobel and Elessar have recently been discussing solutions as well in discord.

What do we do if we fail to elect 3 members to represent a Wiki? We could:

  1. Settle with the number (would need to pass an ordinary resolution to change our number from 7 → X)
  2. Rerun another election later (would still need to do ^ temporarily)
  3. Start allowing an imbalance of member representations? (e.g. if there’s 7 good OSRSW people, do we care?)
  4. Any other ideas?

Some resolutions would need to be passed to allow these changes (mainly some key points in Articles of association section 23). I'll post an update here once the board has discussed further in the meeting. Haidro (talk) 11:30, 12 August 2021 (UTC)

Update & Proposal

Hi all,

The board has discussed and has a proposal + extra things:

  1. We won't change our voting algorithm. We'll continue to use Schulze method, or our "Yes/No" voting method if the number of people running for a Wiki position is less than or equal to 3. A person will require at least 50% Yes to be elected.
  2. We will be publicising candidates before the due date of nominations.
  3. In the event less than 3 people (1 for pt-br) are elected to represent a Wiki, we will rerun a second election. We don't need to set an exact time interval, but one month afterwards may be reasonable, depending on the situation.

Please discuss! Thanks, Haidro (talk) 13:02, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Support - Simple and straightforward. cqm talk 17:04, 17 August 2021 (UTC)

Support - I like the stock proposal. FjaraTalkRxSktuY.png 03:53, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

Support+comment - Publicizing the candidates before the due date of the nominations will hopefully prevent us having a situation where we have so few people elected. The only thing I would say is that one month seems a bit far out to me, you might want to run the second election on an abbreviated schedule so the board can be completely elected as soon as possible. But perhaps my estimation of how long the first election normally takes is off a bit. - Andmcadams (talk) 04:11, 18 August 2021 (UTC)

It will be flexible to allow the board to choose what time is most comfortable. Haidro (talk) 01:12, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

Support & comment - having discussed this these proposals seem the best way to handle the situation without confusing voters. I think leaving it up to board discretion about when to have a second round of elections is best - its likely to depend on the situation when a second round of elections would be effective in gaining a suitable new candidate. How would the third proposal work alongside our current constitution for situations where a member doesn't finish out their term? IsobelJ (talk) 13:53, 19 August 2021 (UTC)

Per article 23.12, elections may be held earlier by ordinary resolution if more than 2 members prematurely terminate their membership.

Closed - New resolutions will be passed in the next meeting to accomodate the above proposal. Haidro (talk) 01:12, 12 September 2021 (UTC)

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