Experiment with some new polling types!

great! but how do you enable them on custom installs? i've set the
group to enable experimental features already, but i don't see the card.

You can enable polls from the /admin section of loomio. There is an enable polls button.

It's possible to directly access @bobhaugen 's poll without seeing this discussion topic which it's attached to. That was confusing for me as I scanned my new Loomio content quickly this morning.

I think that it'd be fine for polls to be associated with a single comments section for a discussion topic which they're attached to-- if you make the relationship as clear as it is for Loomio proposals. (I can see a discussion topic in a window to the left of each Loomio proposal which I consider.)

With that in mind, please accept this version of the comment which I originally made (in a confused state) in another thread:

It's possible I should give this input on Loomio Roadmap or github, but in case it feels like a discussion "subtopic" to anyone: I think that it's very important for polls to have comments sections.

For instance, @bobhaugen created a poll last night in the Product Development subgroup. Please correct me if I'm wrong, Bob, but I believe that poll is supposed to be intentionally silly in a way which criticizes the perils of poll design.

I don't seem to have any option to comment upon that poll without registering one of the predetermined positions. That's a problem for me, because it would be inaccurate (and misleading) for me to register any of those positions.

I care lots about the potential of good poll design, so I'd like to directly and efficiently give my feedback on that specific poll.

I hope that my comments here seem sufficient to indicate the importance of providing an option to comment on a poll without choosing one or more of its options. Does this make sense @gdpelican and others?

BTW, I love having previous poll results hidden by default, but available to people who haven't voted. :)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, Bob, but I believe that poll is supposed to be intentionally silly in a way which criticizes the perils of poll design.

Yes, intentionally silly, but not meant to criticize the perils of poll design. As I wrote in that other thread, I was just trying to test the feature quickly, not design a good poll. I apologize for the silliness. Please design a better poll!

Chronological comment threads are a hammer we're so used to online that there's a danger every UX problem starts to look like a nail. I think if the devs have got the range of new facilitation tools right, and the design of each of them right, then they each offer a solution to the many problems we've all had in Loomio group comment threads (eg the infamous Editing Comments' discussion). If this is the case, do you think there's a risk that tying polls tightly to a meta-discussion via a comment thread somewhat defeats the purpose of them?
EDIT: fixed link

I think the question is moot.
The new facilitation tools are not tightly tied to discussion threads. Or groups. They've been built so they can be integrated into any other platform you like really. Check /p/new and start a poll without any discussion thread at all. Much more granular.

I definitely do not think that chronological non-threaded comments are the right solution to our online discussion problems. I personally design systems for structured conversation. Nonetheless, I think that having a comments option is generally much better than not having one.

I don't think that providing a meta discussion thread inevitably means that a poll is tied "tightly" to the meta-discussion. The strictness of association depends deeply on social context.

With that in mind, I reiterate part of my earlier comment here:

I don't seem to have any option to comment upon that poll without registering one of the predetermined positions. That's a problem for me, because it would be inaccurate (and misleading) for me to register any of those positions.

I care lots about the potential of good poll design, so I'd like to directly and efficiently give my feedback on that specific poll.

With that additionally in mind, I should point out that IMO, poll creators would ideally have the freedom to enable or disable commentary, just as they'd be able to enable or disable others' ability to add poll options/ categories. However, in a world with such technical freedom and power, people could & should be held socially accountable for any questionable decisions, such as disabling commentary on polls.

FYI this all ties directly with the two key questions I ask of technological design options:

1. Does this technology create ability for people to communicate or organize?

2. If this technology restricts ability to communicate or organize, should that be a technical standard or a community standard?

@robertguthrie commented while I was typing, such that my last comment is mostly irrelevant now. The granularity/ modularity he refers to is IMO far superior to tying user choices to a monolithic platform.

Ae, I think we're iterating towards the same position from opposite starting points. Loomio's original interface traditionally worked by "tying polls tightly to a meta-discussion via a comment thread", and a major design decision has been made to move away from that. We all agree (I think) that being able to associate a poll with A discussion area is good, but also that it doesn't have to be a comment thread on Loomio. With the polls becoming more "much more granular", as @robertguthrie puts it, it opens up possibilities for integrating them into other platforms that folks like @bobhaugen have been asking for #UXWin !
EDIT: formatting

Hello! I missed the boat with this one... Approval voting has been mentioned and scored fairly high in the poll. Approval voting is a sub-type of score voting (a.k.a. rating.) In approval voting you rate using two 'levels', in score voting you rate with 3 or more levels.

Rating methods such as approval/score (cardinal systems) have a lot of theoretical and practical benefits over ranking methods such as Condorect/Coombs/Hare/Borda/etc (ordinal systems) in terms of actually identifying what people want.

Very interested to hear if score voting is in the pipeline and if not, happy to advocate further! 😅 For further info on this subject do check out this amazing email list for ongoing discourse about Social Choice theory and this informed but opinionated website about Score Voting.

On a side note, during the last few months in France, a recent voting method is being very positively discussed: it's called Majority Judgment. I am curious what you guys think about it :)

Wow thanks for that email list link Doug! - I just had a look and just found out that PAV had already been invented/theorised about a decade before I even began to come up with it myself - it is really awesome to know that PAV academia already came into existence (about 10 years) before I invented/coined the exact same theory of PAV in my own informal intellectual ramblings seen here: https://www.loomio.org/d/zgYdEaFp/internet-party-democracy

I understand that PAV, which combines both Approval and Preferential/Condorcet voting, is the most optimally inclusive method to achieve a voter convergence outcome.
When openly electing from the group member base it also produces new organic data about where social edges/bonds exist within a group, and which members already naturally tend to serve as central points of group cohesion for a given type of member function (i.e. the responsibilities of the role that is up for election).

Hi Quentin. Majority Judgement looks pretty good: it's a score voting system with some additional features. I recall reading somewhere that the authors found good reasons to use verbal indicators instead of numeric indicators...

Glad you find it useful! Don't get dragged in though... some of those conversations are a bit mind-warping. I would be very interested to test out a proportional approval or score voting app. For me I'm still mostly concerned with single-winner methods.

True.

When it comes to proportional ​voting I understand that there is no single best way to do it - because it is generally premised on assuming that groups can be partitioned into distinct groups of unique identity - a good example of attempted proportionalism is the party vote.

However identity is multidimensional and no individual belongs solely to one kind of group - but can and does belong to many categories.

This is why I think designing voting systems based on identity politics (and proportionalism) is inherently flawed.

But rather single winner and multi winner methods are best if they are premised on finding the nodes where edges of popularity tend to centralise.

And if in multi winner methods the outcomes also just happen to look like​ a proportional selection of various 'identity' categories, then this fortunate coincidence is just how the cards stacked up when everyone wrote their ballot.

Ah! Yep, for electing representatives to positions I think multi-winner methods could drastically improve current governance systems. However, I believe that 'single-winner' methods are ultimately required for direct decisions (like setting up the systems for having representatives in the first place...)

In a community setting for example, you might need a single-winner method for selecting a policy for sharing the projector. However, that policy might specify a multi-winner method (like PAV) for selecting which films are watched during the week.

Post moved to https://www.loomio.org/d/laZLgn2I/time-poll/18