Loomio democracy - plurality approval-at-large polls

IMO this would require other models of delegation of responsibilities, but it would be cool to know who's responsible of what...

• personal delegation and revocability (duration optional?)
• group delegation
• delegation by lot :D
• others?

I think any personal approval ratings should be tied directly to a person's performance in specific domains/functions, such as their areas of (supposed) expertise. This would parallel, for instance, LinkedIn's endorsements system, although I don't like the radically reductive nature of that system. (In LinkedIn, you either indicate "yes this person has this skill" or you don't give feedback at all.)

Perhaps there could be both.
A generic approval rating for members of a group - pure democracy
As well as approval ratings for specialised skills - meritocracy - more or less a member endorsed selection of skills

[EDIT: I lost track of the details in the OP here and started asking you @williamasiata to repeat yourself; sorry! I'll make a new comment.]

The process I had in mind was basically to democratically determine the all round "front" person/people that is thought to represent a group of people in various contexts. The people you want to delegate to attend various functions to be the "official" representatives, or the people you wish to be the "head" administrators of a group of people.
Could still have endorsements on various skill sets too - to ease decision-making when delegating specific tasks.

I frankly think that generic personal approval ratings per group would create problems in most if not all groups. People need to know what they're rating; otherwise it can just turn into a popularity contest (and it probably will, to some extent, anyway.)

That's my general view on it; but to be more practical @williamasiata , I think that kind of psychometric tool is probably well outside of any plans for Loomio's foreseeable future. I'm not a Loomio developer, however, so it would be better for one of them to comment on that.

Okay well I don't think that anyone should represent a group officially in various contexts, haha-- I'm practically an anarchist-- so I can't really dig into that concept.

I guess that traditional orgs, or newer orgs that want a somewhat traditional top-down approach, could create a metric which is used to assess which members are "thought to consistently and accurately reflect the group's values", and/or to "be well-versed in organizational knowledge." These are somewhat useful concepts I guess, but they're not equivalent to a generic or global personal rating.

True, but in working with the current mainstream paradigm, if say, we had a popular, well functioning group on Loomio, and then decided we should run someone from that group for a seat in council or parliament so we can make change on some of the policies we adore, I think such a democratic rating tool would be quite useful in deciding who is worthy of rising to the honour.

As great as it is to be an anarchist, it doesn't hurt to have some kind of function that can interface with the current mainstream paradigm and help facilitate a transition at that level as well. Perhaps it is the terminology that is questionable. Maybe "delegate" is easier to identify with than "representative" which brings a lot of heavy baggage with it these days.

You have a lot of good points and important concerns @williamasiata . I just think that popularity contests are generally a bad idea when it comes to positions of official authority, including "spokesperson" roles and positional coercive authority (such as governance and administration.). This area is one of my main focal points and I'm quite radical about it, but in a different way.

Communities are a natural and organic thing, but intentional communities (or networks) are projects, and those projects have "responsible parties", caretakers, or however one puts it. (Sometimes, it's a board of directors or trustees.) If we want to work in a reasonably effective way within (or in the general vicinity of) the current mainstream paradigm, I think it helps to start with a deep focus on such governance structures. For instance, we can advocate for consensus-oriented process in those groups, instead of majority voting.

I think that consensus process is a really transformative process, especially when "responsible parties" have to find consensus in full sight of their communities.

Consensus process can be used to determine one or more spokespeople, when that seems desirable or necessary.

On a side note, I'm extremely interested in ratings systems, but I think that ratings based on the arithmetic mean are of limited use.

Yes, and I think approval voting is one form of measuring the extent of consensus across a range of options and in which option the highest consensus resides - the higher the approval rating of an option, the greater the consensus across a group for that option. Naturally, the option that is designated will be the one that receives the highest level of consensus ("approval"). Not limited to mere single choice plurality voting and FPP simple majorities.

I think approval ratings are usually associated with someone's performance in a specific role, or the idea of putting them into a specific role. Specific roles have specific duties and/or expectations. I would much sooner rate someone's perceived fitness for a specific set of duties and/or expectations than their... well, their generic nature, or even their generic fitness as a network member. Am I missing something?

True. I guess if such a feature were implemented, it would be up to the groups themselves to determine what they would use it for if they wanted to use it. Could be used on several occasions for different events.

Thanks for your ideas and feedback @williamasiata -- I'll make room for other potential commentators!

Just like opening a proposal in threads, groups could also open and run polls across their membership at anytime to fill various offices - perhaps running several different polls for different "offices" simultaneously. Then people would have a clearer definition of what positions they're voting for.
Would be good if the poll creator could set voting method parameters so the kind of voting method can also be chosen.
Here it is @gregorycassel polls to find people to serve a specific role that require a particular set of skills you were talking about.
I think I finally understand what you meant.

Would be interesting to see such a system working - kind of reverse to the mainstream tradition.
Instead of nominating candidates and then voting between them, do the voting across the membership first and then nominate those that poll the highest straight into the role if they're interested, otherwise the next one in line and so on until someone finally accepts.

Cheers @gregorycassel thanks and all the best

I do think that ballots for this kind of poll should be censored though. Only the outcome can be seen, and only a record of your own ballot can be accessed. Just to keep everyone on the same level.
Contrary to the discussion proposals where everyone can see each other's preferences and reasoning and discuss ideas.

Here is an example of the idea being implemented by a community

So, I think that any kind of select-some-members-for-a-function operation should be performed only among the people who have volunteered to perform that function. In other words you don't want to vote and find that the person/people with the most votes are too busy/unavailable/uninterested to take on the role.

I imagine this kind of polling would grow naturally out of discussions of the topic for which people are needed. That is, before voting on "who should be the grand pooh-bah", there is usually discussion of "should we designate someone as grand pooh-bah?".

It seems in my experience that during those preliminary discussions, as the consensus leans towards designating people for a task, volunteers step forward. Sometimes more volunteers than are needed, and sometimes volunteers that are mutually exclusive for one reason or another.

So the proposal that grows out of such situations isn't usually "who out of all the participants in the group should we select?", it is "which of these few volunteers should we select?".

This can be generalized and apply to just about any multiple-choice question. Which means (to me) that an ideal solution would be less specific than "pick one or more of these people from the list", from a feature point of view it should be "pick one or more of these options from the list".

It basically boils down to another angle on this discussion: https://www.loomio.org/d/0aLrz5BK/another-discussion-about-improving-proposals

I'm going to disagree on this particular proposal, however I think slightly broader choices should be available when creating proposals -- including multiple choice, which could then be used for voting.

I don't disagree very strongly with the aims of this proposal, but think the implementation could be more general.

Hi sir wumpus. In response to some of the things you mentioned:
I think that the appointment of "winners" can be a robust process if they have the option of choosing to accept the role and if not then the popular "right" to the role then goes to the next person in line. I also have no qualms with the idea of empowered volunteers also arising to assist the popular "chosen one" in the duties of the role. The volunteers may even become the popular choice in successive elections.

Could not at-large elections act in the same way as designating the preferred volunteer if everyone in the group was very enfranchised in their participation with the group’s activities?

The problem with your algorithm (Pick the first willing participant in sequence of popularity for the role) is that the people who voted for the top choice (in a hypothetical situation where the top choice winner declines) have effectively no input to the decision. It feels.... wasteful of potentially good inputs.

To address this one could allow weighted voting where people pick a number of choices and order them by preference (a feature that would also be useful in other multiple choice scenarios) but it still seems like the most efficient solution is to winnow the candidates down to a reasonable set prior to a proposal being made .

If I understand you correctly, then yes I agree that an at-large election could be mechanically equivalent to designating the preferred volunteer, if everyone in the group were to volunteer. However my intuition tells me that is an extreme edge case in all but the smallest groups.

Hey SW. In reply to your reply, the method I am proposing (maybe I didn't explain it very well) does allow for unlimited multiple choices - at the voter's discretion. Then if the person first in line declines, the second person and so on still has the most endorsements possible from the group.
And yes ranking the votes on a ballot would also be good to determine how to break the tie when two members have a matched number of endorsements.

I tend to think that most [collaborative selection of one from many], including the selection of willing volunteers for organizational roles, should ultimately occur through an unhurried budgeting process, such as Cobudget, in which everyone has equal 'funds'.

Sounds like Co budget is quite democratic

Regarding Cobudget: yes, it's very democratic, although its use-cases so far have been deliberately limited in scope. If you haven't seen this before, please check out the general vision in this awesome Collaborative Funding essay by Cobudget's (and Loomio's) own Alanna Krause.

I lack experience in Cobudget but your mention of it has once again popped it nearly to the top of my stack. I like what I have seen of it, but don't quite grok how that selection process would work.

Regardless it makes me wonder if there are any plans for integrating loomio and cobudget at some point, or does that even make sense? I mean I understand that they are different chunks of software, and it would not be desirable to merge them at that level. But something like linking budget items in cobudget with sub-groups or individual topics in loomio?

I have actually theorized and developed in depth about how to combine the ideal aspects desired from both approval based voting and preferential based voting to get the mathematically "optimum" result from an election across a community at large to fill any number of seats.
Yet to implement it in reality - only very practical these days with the aid of today's computing power. Hence it was never tried in the past, and why we're still stuck with conservative traditional systems that just isn't as fair as what's possible to imagine.

Yes, there's a lot of ongoing thought on how to help Loomio and Cobudget play nicely together. :)

I don't want to go too far afield from the topic here. My ideas on collaborative-budget-voting are kind of fringe. Regarding the OP: I do think that the Loomio team's intentions have always been to focus on binary propositions.

It's interesting how Loomio proposals are limited to a choice between 4 options of which you can choose only 1.

In contrast, the election poll I'm proposing would have multiple options equivalent to the number of members in a group, from which you can select any amount. And perhaps even rank them if you wish - as Wumpus mentioned.

@williamasiata It would be interesting to see your ideas at work in a real implementation. I'm just not all that sure that loomio is the right tool to incorporate it, and if loomio were to incorporate it I would hope for it to be generalized beyond voting for people.

Regardless, I look forward to seeing other peoples input on this topic.

Hmm. Perhaps it could still draw from the same database of groups and members - save time spent duplicating information. A different tool altogether with Interoperability and APIs. There's an idea. Add that to the ecosystem.

A tool that can draw on the database of many groups on many platforms, as long as there is that API ability to connect

Loomio has focused on the inclusive resolution of binary (yes/no type) proposals. I'm not part of the Loomio team, but I don't think anyone there has tried to position Loomio as the end-all solution of group decision process. There's a pretty strong emphasis on modular design hereabouts, with specific tools and apps to address clearly and practically defined problems.

Yes I did read that essay previously ☺. Looking forward to a release to the wider friends

The point in electing people is not to get people elected, but to get people supported. Whereas Loomio suffer from an inherent lack of participation in votes, due to many reasons: this is a website optional in everyday life where people comes asynchronously and where many people sign up to try but are not really there, which creates mechanically a huge lot of abstention, which is a mess for election success (remember: goal is to gather people behind a representative more than just having one). I'm not saying this is impossible to elect people on Loomio if the feature exists, but I guess il will be really hard to achieve the proper goal.

I'm not sure 'approval rating' of people is something that should be encouraged on Loomio. Has potential to encourage popularity contests / ranking of people within a group, rather than consideration of ideas on their own merits.

What could be useful though is a mechanism for electing the moderators/administrators of a Loomio group. More broadly some of the functions of these individuals could be democratised using Loomio itself? This is a direction that it'd be great for technology to move in - democratising the administrator function within the code itself!