Alex wrote:
To make it look like a formal organization, maybe Mike will declare us to be members of the Election Methods Education and Research Group. Then we can post our report and press releases there. I reply: I'll talk to Russ & Rob L., but even without talking to them, it's obvious that increased membership is what a small organization needs, and so it doubt very much that they'd object to the EMERG organization adding members other than its 3 founding members. EMERG would benefit from the higher membership numbers, and from more things being done under its name. EM's Approval project could benefit from the use of a pre-existing Approval organization such as EMERG. I realize that, with only 3 members, EMERG isn't a _strong_ accretion nucleus, but we've been on the web for some time now, and have gotten lots of website-visitors and questions. We've been doing things in the way of advocacy of Approval and sharing about IRV's disadvantages, though the only part of that work that's under the EMERG name is the replies to questions to the website. Of course any organization has founding principles, and EMERG has the founding principle that a very important goal of single-winner reform is to get rid of the lesser-of-2-evils problem. That leads to our criteria and our method recommendations. But I don't believe there need be any problem from the fact that some EM Approvalists have different standards than we do. Part of EMERG's goal is to advance Approval, and someone who doesn't necessarily agree with our founding principle or with all of our proposals could easily work with us in organized Approval work, just as electoral reformers with different political beliefs work together all the time. It isn't necessary for all Approval advocates to like Approval for identical reasons, or to agree on what other methods are good. One reason why EMERG has only 3 members is because its 3 founding members aren't really organizers. Most likely Russ & Rob L. would agree that it would be great to start a bigger organization that gains prestige as it gains size, and I doubt very much that they'd object to that organization starting as EMERG. An advantage of that approach is that it avoids the need to vote on the name of a new organization, and avoids duplication of effort and unnecessary competition that can occur when there are unnecessarily many organizations with the same goal. Bylaws issues could be dealt with later, after we determined that we have a larger organization. So, as the 1st person replying to the EMERG suggestion, I think it sounds fine. Mike Ossipoff _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
