Please vote within 7 days on the following:
PROPOSAL
That as soon as feasible the Neither Technical group give priority to
implementing an online polling system which enables any member or
project or regional group to initiate a poll on any topic by filling in
a form on a web page, so that details of a proposal and deadline, will
be published at a URL with mailto links that people can click to record
a YES, NO or ABSTAIN vote by sending email to a vote counting address
instead of to an email list and which automatically publishes the
results of such polling.
Vote by clicking below, then click Send (before noon AEST Saturday 28
November 1998).
YES
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=POLL%20Online-Polling%20YES?Body=
YES
NO
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=POLL%20Online-Polling%20NO?Body=N
O
ABSTAIN
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=POLL%20Online-Polling%20ABSTAIN?B
ody=ABSTAIN
If you change your mind, just vote again - latest date counts.
Please do not add comments to your votes as they will not be seen by
participants who implement filters to eliminate clutter from messages
with subjects starting with "POLL".
Instead post comments as replies to this subject thread:
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Subject=Parliament%20of%20the%20Net
which is also shown in links added to the first YES vote in the archive.
Results can be viewed at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/public-list@neither.org/
under the 3 subject threads "POLL Online-Polling YES", ...NO and
...ABSTAIN
YES CASE
"As soon as feasible" is deliberately vague. Certain other priorities
such as enabling ftp access for updating web pages must obviously come
first in order for this proposal to be implemented, so it is left up to
the Technical group to work it in with it's other priorities (when it
gets going), but a significant YES vote should result in action being
taken earlier rather than later.
Major resources will not be required as suitable voting software is
already widely available on the net: See for example
http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/~lorracks/sensus/hotlist.html
The benefits can only be evaluated when some sort of system is available
for trial.
Polling via use of separate YES, NO or ABSTAIN subject threads as in
this experiment is unsatisfactory as it will eventually result in
significant clutter in email lists from voting messages that are of no
interest in themselves but should merely be collected and tabulated at a
separate email address for polling and published from there for those
who are interested. It is also inconvenient to setup, and an inefficient
use of archive resources.
By providing an easy way to initiate such a poll, more people will be
encouraged to do so rather than left wondering whether their ideas have
any support and there will be less clutter in email lists resulting from
attempts to drum up support or opposition without substantive comment.
The initial system can later be developed for use in formal votes when a
democratic structure is established (e.g. verifying that votes come from
people entitled to vote and enabling "secret ballot").
It can also be further developed to provide continuous "feedback" on
messages that will be necessary for a "Parliament of the Net" (POTN).
Any large scale POTN will involve thousands of people publishing
thousands of messages in at least dozens or hundreds of email lists etc
and will require automated "filtering" into a "Hansard" report of the
"official" proceedings that people can refer to in deciding their votes
on formal policy proposals.
A step towards that would be a means for recording the "popularity" of
messages and authors, which could be developed into a formal voting
system where people with "sufficient" voting support automatically
become authorised to contribute to the official record (and get
automatically demoted when they lose that support as a result of failure
to answer opposition to their ideas expressed not only in the official
record but also in numerous other mailing lists etc).
BTW in conversation with Patrick tonite he made an interesting
suggestion that a visual symbolism of a Parliament could be used on a
web site with representatives taking their "seats" on a web page with
indicators of how many votes they currently have and who they are
sitting with.
PS Thanks again to Grigull for explaining how to use mailto's!
*************
[JS]
[...] what about setting up an email or on-line polling system for
such questions, presumably with automatic counting and reporting. Basic
Yes
and No cases could be presented with initial poll, but should also
provide
for pollees to comment.
Jim Stewart
[AL]
This is a response to the above from:
http://www.mail-archive.com/public-list@neither.org/msg00225.html
Ok, I'm trying an experimental email poll above. Please vote on it by
clicking a link above and debate it by responding to this "Parliament of
the Net" subject thread which started with:
http://www.mail-archive.com/public-list@neither.org/msg00022.html
We can fairly easily setup an email polling system for "straw polls" so
that instead of email lists getting cluttered with "I agree" and "Me
too" or "I disagree" messages they are sent to a separate polling
address and running totals and/or lists of supporters, opponents and
abstainers is automatically maintained at a web URL where people can
easily refer to it.
My guess is that this won't be particularly useful now because asking
for the numbers for or against any proposal in this mailing list is not
a viable method of decision making. However it could be of some benefit
now in gaining informal indications without clutter, will be needed as
soon as we do have a definate membership and democratic structure with
some kind of national council that meets regularly by email, and could
be helpful in getting started towards developing "Parliament of the Net"
debate software.
Meanwhile we can already do it as above WITH clutter, by simply starting
separate "POLL proposal YES" and "POLL proposal NO" and ...ABSTAIN
subject threads for each proposal that anyone wants an indicative straw
poll on, which people reply to by a simple Yes or No in the appropriate
subject thread, so that people interested can see the list of names for,
against and abstaining, by looking at the mail-archive index, and people
anxious to avoid clutter can implement a filter against messages that
have subject lines starting with "POLL" (and ending with YES, NO or
ABSTAIN).
We can also easily eliminate the clutter by simply providing a separate
email list, say [EMAIL PROTECTED], with archive, just for such messages,
which people only post to without subscribing to receive the messages
(but can see them tabulated automatically at the archive). However this
still won't make it obvious how to initiate a poll - that would require
a small amount of extra work.
I see no value in asking pollees for brief comments with their votes.
That would mean people would need to actually look at the YES, NO or
ABSTAIN messages to see the brief comments, or more complex software to
extract them and make them available separately. It would be better for
people who have something substantive to say on a topic to do it in a
separate debate thread and people who just want to express support,
opposition or abstention to do so without comment. Likewise, the YES and
NO cases should simply be messages in a debate subject thread for a
particular proposal.
As an experiment I manually created mailto's for 3 such subject threads
above. (My guess is that most lurkers will just continue to lurk rather
than abstaining or voting, but this is a specific request not to lurk
for this experiment). Please do not repeat this experiment for other
polls until we at least have a separate email address for them as it
WILL cause clutter (unless ignored).
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