http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electionmethods/join
If you are interested in election methods, please consider joining the Election Methods Interest Group though the link above, or by sending a piece of mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and responding to the confirmation mail. If it develops that there is more traffic here than you wish to receive, you could set your subscription to Special Notices, which shuts off traffic but still allows you access when you want it, and still allows the group to send you a message subject to moderator approval (which will itself be subject to group decision, Special Notices will not ordinarily be sent without a group decision to do so.) Registration with this list by election methods experts is especially invited. From the basic description on Yahoo: >This is a mailing list and group for the discovery, measurement, and >expression of consensus among those interested in election methods. >Except as expressed formally through polls and consensus documents, >with the broadest possible participation and representation, this >group has no opinion on any issue of controversy and no outside >affiliation. Affiliations of members and officers should not be >taken as representing, in any way, the position of this group, which >remains, as a group, rigorously impartial with respect to any controversy. Part of the purpose of this group is to discover consensus among election methods experts with regard to various assertions that are sometimes made on behalf of that community. "According to election experts," is sometimes stated with no evidence whatever being presented that even the majority of election experts, much less the consensus implied, agrees with the statement which follows. EMIG is a Free Association with Delegable Proxy, which allows, for example, a busy expert or other person to join and, without necessarily personally participating, weight polls or filter discussions through a proxy. Many people who might otherwise have an interest in the subject of an organization avoid joining because of the time that participation can involve. This is an attempt to solve that problem. Means will be provided for members to name a proxy to stand in for them when appropriate. Because EMIG is a Free Association, it accumulates no power and cannot bind its members, it solely exists for communication and the measurement of consensus, and other than with respect to its own internal issues, where it seeks the broadest possible consensus, it imposes no decision on anyone, and it refrains from expressing a group opinion on any outside controversy, including controversies over election methods. Nonetheless, it may poll its members to measure agreement with various possibly controversial questions. These polls may be reported, provided that the reporting is complete, providing reference to the complete report on the question, which would include poll data and minority reports, if submitted. Initially, standard deliberative process will be used, as adapted for on-line mailing lists, for the presentation of any questions for poll, and the founding moderator is Abd ul-Rahman Lomax; however, it is not his desire to continue long in that position, so nominations for moderators will be in order at any time. Polls are initially set as being created by moderators only, because, properly, no poll should be taken without group consent, for answers can depend critically on the exact wording of questions, and polls can exhaust the patience of members. It is expected that EMIG will develop documents expressing the collective opinion of those knowledgeable about election methods, done according to the Wikipedia concept of Neutral Point of View, which allows the expression of opinions if they are qualified as such and attributed. Documents would likely be developed using wiki tools such as those used by Wikipedia and, in fact, Wikipedia itself may be used to create draft documents with all the power of MediaWiki. This list and its proxy tools would then be used to measure and report consensus regarding any controversial aspects of the issue under consideration. It should be emphasized that membership in the Election Methods Mailing List is open to all interested in the topic. Databases, however, may be developed which reflect the general community opinion regarding the qualifications of members and thus a definition of "expert" may be developed, so that polls can be reported separately as "general opinion" and "expert opinion." If we are careful about how we approach this, documents approved by EMIG will more truly qualify as "peer-reviewed" than any article in any known academic journal, and thus can be the basis of further citation and use. Indeed, the immediate occasion for the formation of EMIG is the need of Wikipedia for reliable sourced information, and the lack of any standards to by which the extensive informal research, which exists in this field, can be vetted and used, until the quirky and slow process of formal academic publication manages to catch up with the state-of-the-art, which can take many years. With permission, members of EMIG may submit documents created jointly for formal publication in existing journals, where this is considered appropriate and acceptable to the journals. In this case, the permitted member may be listed as an author of the article, provided that full attribution is made to all those who participated in the creation of the document, which is satisfied by reference to a wiki history file. All aspects of EMIG are subject to the approval of the members and may be modified as the membership determines, including all aspects described in this initial message. Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, the founding trustee, may exercise ad-hoc veto power, but pledges never to use this as a means of asserting his own opinions other than those which can be seen as an organizational promise. Even with respect to what he might see as a violation of that promise, he would not restrain a determined and genuine majority from altering any aspect of the organization, beyond acting to protect the rights of a dissenting minority (which could involve a fission of the organization, with no bias in that process toward any descendant organization). These are FA/DP concepts, see http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki for further information. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
