Where is the voting booth?

Personal attacks such as this will not be tolerated in this group forum. Stick to the discussion of issues and proposed solutions without shaming, criticising, or defaming individuals. Free speech stops when it is unambiguously created to harm others.

Future infractions will lead to the editing or deletion of posts and a hearing in front of the SC. If anyone would like to discuss this, let's spawn a separate thread, where we can discuss official policies for dealing with forum posting policies and moderation.

~Ulrika~

Thanks for the good word, Pendari.

With your explanation I'm beginning to see the problem. A lot of folks just coming onto the project are seeing the city infrastructure as a service, where they expect a polished infrastructure to be provided for them. When this infrastructure does not function to their satisfaction, they get upset with the person they see as their servant.

On the other hand, I view this project as an experimental collaborative of people contributing whatever skills they have, to create as a group a functioning society. I do not expect anything for free nor do I expect that any service will be provided for me unless I go out and do it myself.

I suspect that this is a clash of cultures between the experimentalists who created this project and the newcomers who expect a full-service society complete with a bag of chips.


The solution is simple. We just have to communicate. I feel this thread, thanks to your and Dianne's post, has gone a long way to helping us all reach at least a partial understanding. I just wish there hadn't been so many personal attacks. That's something I'm not used to seeing in this group.

So, with that said, let's stick with this election. When the next RA is elected, let's have them set some guidelines for future elections setting limits on advertising, duration, verification, discussion, and analysis. That seems like a good solution to me.

~Ulrika~

No, really! I'm still "new" to Neualten; At the time I recalled the Costume Party being mentioned at some point when I browsed the back posts of the forum; so I made the natural (for me) assumption that there were a couple of N-burgers who had resurrected it.

A bunch of people who can take this thing sincerely, but not seriously, appeals greatly to me; I'm tempted to make them or similar non-fictional by the time of next election. (No smiley here - I'm serious about my humor.)


In any case - I'm not heartbroken. With 17 people, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion from the get-go; we all know how everyone is likely to vote, and the overall mechanism is inefficent for such a small group.

I am not critizicing it, though; by the time we expand out to another sim (when, not if, eternal optimist me) and have more people, we'll be wanting to have firmly established traditions, habits, and rules for when we do need it. And as for this little experiment... eh, it changes nothing, and some valuable sociological studies require the subjects to be ignorant of the study until afterwards. Doesn't really bother me.

Do it again and I'll throw prims at ya.

Actually, this is a misconception. If one defines efficiency as the number of bills passed divided by the total number of person hours required to pass those bills, one will see that a direct democracy is the least efficient and an autocracy is the most efficient. Note that in this case efficiency is inversely proportional to the likelihood that a single person will abuse the system. Thus a representative government is an excellent compromise between efficiency and the abuse of the system by a single person.

Additionally, our government has three branches that were created to increase efficiency by rewarding and giving power to productive individuals. For instance, since content is king in SL, anyone who shows great skills in coding, building, or holding events quickly becomes a master in the guild. The goal of this is to prevent content creators from being servants to the RA (like a corporation), while investing valuable players in the system. The same thing applies to the SC for those who like the deep thought behind the law, science, and economy of the system.

By having multiple independent avenues to achieve recognition and power, it engages more of the populace and increases efficiency despite its seeming complexity.

~Ulrika~

Well, for myself, I'm glad that citizens actively discuss some issues that need clarification and that may not be so obvious. It's far better than to bring those issues to openly discuss them than to keep them to yourself, so I really would like to encourage an open discussion around the election process.

Throwing in my L$ 0.02, I'd just would like to say the following...

1. Ulrika is not directly "responsible" for the votation booth. Things are slightly more complex than that. Technically, it's up to the Representative Assembly to work out the election details (the Constitution mostly says that the RA sets the duration of the election terms). The RA thought that we should have a votation booth that works in-world and that you can transparently monitor off-world, and comissioned the Guild (as usual) to do that work. Ulrika did it, we did some tests, we ran an election successfully, and there was no reason to change the system for this elections.
   It's the job of the Scientific Council to approve or not the decision of using a certain voting system according to the principles stated in the Constitution. I think that the SC had no problems with the current one.
   Of course, the next RA may find out that the current voting booth is not appropriate for any of several reasons and comission a new one. Since it takes quite a long period of time to do that, the current RA felt that Ulrika's booth & associated website was the best choice we had, and we stuck with it.
   
2. The election process is not clear enough. As a member of the current RA, I feel that this is all our fault (notice that Ulrika is not a member of the current RA). We wrongly assumed that the system was clear for everybody, since there are really a few hundred posts on the issue in the public forums, as well as a general procedure stated in the Constitution (ie. the question of how the factions work). Sudane, Eugene and myself have been explaining these issues to most of the people that asked us directly, but, reading Dianne's post, it seems that our job was not well done. This should definitely be addressed by the next RA, and there are several things that could have been done, namely:
   1. Having a notecard with the overall description of the process;
      
   2. Holding a Town Hall for Q&A regarding the process;
      
   3. More information on the official web site (again, it seems we underestimated the information that is already there)
      
   
   
3. For personal reasons (giving birth and catching a cold...), Ulrika has been less "available" than usual, and nothing was done to "replace" her in the process of setting up the voting booth. Well, this has sadly happened because the RA "assumed" Ulrika would be available all the time, and couldn't predict what would go wrong when she wasn't available. I know, this is a "lame excuse", and should also be addressed next time.
   
4. The verification of the election process is not clear enough. After all, we don't have access to the code (either for the booth or the associated website), so we have to trust Ulrika's word that things work as she says it does I understand that some may not be comfortable with that approach, and we could give some more thoughts to this. I'm not sure how we can do things even more transparently, but it's more a question of creativity than a technical hurdle to overcome.
   
5. Certain "innovations" on the voting process were not discussed properly. I'm referring to things like the "Costume Party" (something which most felt that it was unnecessary) or "voting by proxy". Well, we have to be reasonable and understand that setting up the voting system is something the RA "delegates" to a third party (Ulrika in this case) - it's not something that is checked for every tiny detail. What we do is to generally agree if the voting system has fulfilled its purpose according to the guidelines we have proposed, and, if not, what did went wrong and how we can change it the next time. You could see this as a "government project" like any other. Many of those "commissioned projects" were changed or abandoned or completely replaced by something else because the RA thought they didn't work as intended originally.
   
6. Comments are being done during the election by someone having access to privileged data. Well, I also have my doubts about the wisdom of that. I would prefer that any comments should only be done after the election has finished.
   
7. Criticism is encouraged and very welcome. We're humans and make errors and I think that we can only learn to accept other's comments and suggestions to make things work better next time. There will be a new RA soon, and I do think that one of the first bills to discuss & approve at the new RA (remember, anybody can propose new bills, not only the RA's members!!) is to do an independent evaluation of what went well with the voting system and what has to be changed next time. Also, there is absolutely no reason why we can't use a completely different system next time - the RA has the authority to propose to comission a new one, if they feel that the current one does not fulfill the purposes intended in the Constitution (and yes, the Scientific Council will certainly have a saying in that as well).
   

From my personal point of view, I feel I'm "privileged". The voting system is basically the same as last time, where I had lots of questions about it, but I think it had worked rather well, so I expect it to work fine this time again.

Perhaps two last comments: I really don't have the slightest idea if Ulrika intends any sort of "experiment" or having us as her "guinea pigs", but I definitely don't see it that way. I don't see the election process as an "experiment" or a "test" either - it led to very interesting and mostly surprising results last time, unforeseen to most. I think it worked well to show what people really preferred, and not what was thought they wanted. Also, if I may remind you, there is no real "leader of the community" in Neualtenburg - there isn't even a "leading role" in Neualtenburg (ie. a Head of State or a City Mayor or something similar). And Ulrika wasn't even a member of the RA during the current term which has now ended although she was part of the original group that set up perhaps 90% of the original sim (Anzere). So, all her recent work was mostly done "under comission" from the RA.

If the current RA did a bad job handling all the above - well, the answer is very simple, vote against a new term with the same people

Last but not least, Neualtenburg's forums are strangely the more "peaceful" I have encountered in the overall SL forum structure. Yes, I know nobody would like to scroll back in history to read 2000 posts about things that happened over the course of one year, but you'll see that there were many criticisms in the past, and some rhetorical challenges as well, followed-up with in-world meetings and email exchanges It's impossible, I think, to get an "unanimous agreement" on everything - thankfully, we're all different. So far, what we managed to get is a "good compromise" and openly discuss the things that we like and dislike (say, clouds ).

Ad Majorem Neualtenburg Gloriam!

Great post Gwyneth. Thanks!

I just wanted to remind everyone that the voting receipts that are provided allow you to verify the results of the election completely. All the RA has to do is commission a single person (preferably a good coder or someone with a knack for math) to collect your URLs and then do the tally by hand (or by using the existing program). This could be a standard part of the procedure, if the RA would like.

The only time I interfere is if I see attempts at voting fraud (voting with alts), invalid votes (noncitizens), or bugs (double votes). Even then all receipts are kept, it's just that the invalid ones aren't counted in the final tally.

~Ulrika~

I really wish you would stop pushing this idea.
You presented it exactly the same way before Pendari "clarified" things for you as well.

As one (of perhaps three "new folks" and having one of the others as my best friend, I can tell you it's just not true. In fact, I told you it wasn't true in a previous post and i find it insulting that you just ignore that and keep on with it.

It is certainly not true for me and if you float this argument again I would request that you specifically refer to the fact that I as one of the "new people" do not think this at all.

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A hearing in front of the SC? My goodness. How terrifying. In view of what information was readily available to the latecomers to Neualtenburg I consider my reaction perfectly reasonable. Some clarifications have since been offered which would have resulted in different comments, and I thank those people for their efforts.

I also don't like being the recipient of personal attacks, by the way; I'm not in the habit of, for instance, creating speech unambiguously to harm people, so I shall be reading carefully to ensure that doesn't happen.

Hi Gwyn,
I really appreciate your reasoned approach here and the clarification it gives to some of the things that were bothering me. I think I agree with most of your points, but because I feel I need to defend some of what I have said, I am going to comment just a bit.

By that comment I was referring to Ulrika being the owner of the object or the person that was responsible for physically putting out the voting booth in the town square. I dont think that is a good policy. This is nothing personal against any particular member. However I do feel that regardless of whether an individual is actually a candidate or not, that anyone who is intimately associated with any particular faction in any election should not have access in any way to the machinery of that election. The election machinerey shoud be controlled or at the very least implemented during the election itself, by third parties only. This is standard democracy to me.
I understand now why it was not done but it was a surprise to me at the time.

I feel that this is my fault as well for not understanding the process as it is up to the public to educate themselves on the issues and the process. Perhaps I am a dummy, but I want to say that I *did* try to educate myself. I did try to read all that stuff although I dont think it's fair to expect folks to read the forums. I also bothered poor Sudane to death trying to get her to explain things to me but despite her best efforts I may have misunderstood some parts of the process.

The proper materials should likely be available in world and possibly (just as in a RL election), pamphlets clearly spelling out the process should likely be distributed just to avoid confusion. I am told by many that I have a tlent for boiling down a lot of stuff into simple clearly understandable documents. I can, and would like to help with this process in the future if anyone is interested.
I want to be very clear that I have no concerns about Ulrika's code either for the web or the booth. I suspect no shenanigans or anything out of order in any way in regards the code, or Ulrikas production of the code, or ownership of the code.

[/b] I agree. This is standard practice in most RL elections again although recently the development of the Internet itself has put a lot of pressure on governments in general to allow "live" commenting on partial results. I feel that this is something we should discuss.

I cant remember if perhaps I left the plural off of the word when I used it, but by that I was referring to "leaders" not a single leader. I was *not* trying to paint anyone as being in the position of being some over-arching personality that directed things in any "top down" sort of way or of having any undue or improper control over things.

My comparison was meant to highlight the difference between a person being a respected, talented and strong "leader" *within* a community as opposed to someone who may feel or act more like an outsider dealing with the community as if it were an object or plaything. I do not know a lot of the personalities in Neualtenburg and don't want to make judgements about what others may or may not see as their roles. I find that offensive when someone tries to do that to me.

If someone makes a comment however, that directly implies this kind of "outside" view, regardless of whether the statement was made in jest, I think it fair to make the comparison.

I dont want any scientist poking at me from afar in my petri dish, I want to get together with other freindly amoebas and take over the dish.

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Yes, Master. Your servant obeys.

~Ulrika~

Actually, I'm the perfect person to implement the vote. I'm the guild master who created the booth, the web site, and the tallying program. I'm also the head of the Scientific Council, whose duty it is to protect the constitution, prevent crimes, and judge transgressors. Because of this I'm ineligible to hold office in the RA. In our system I'm frankly the absolute natural person to have this responsibility.

Where a third party does fit in, is in the verification of the voting results. This is done by sending them your voting receipts.

Whether or not I or my code can be trusted is irrelevant. The point is you all have voting receipts so a third party can varify the results. This is done by sending them your voting receipts.

There's nothing wrong with being studied from above by someone with an interest in sociology. It's not like it's something I can stop. You'll just have to get used to the scrutiny.

OK. So who wants a carrot?

~Ulrika~

Personal attacks in world or in the forum are never a reasonable form of communication.

All that I ask is that we keep it civil and professional in the forums. Talk to each other as if you were at a business meeting sitting in a room with your coworkers and boss. It's also quite alright to have some fun as well.

~Ulrika~

This thread is now about guinea pigs.

~Ulrika~

A representive democracy requires additional overhead, in terms of the effort needed to set it all up. I fail to see how 17 people in a town-hall meeting will turn into "mob rule" yet the much larger Congress of the United States is portion of a functional government.
(Granted, given the nonsense in the US over the last few years, I could perhaps choose a more convincing example of a "functional government" elsewhere, hm? )

But, as I've said before, here and elsewhere, my objections are not strong ones or I wouldn't be here. There's other places to get virtual land, other ways I could do things. I do not think I am prey to the "expecting an already-set-up system with services" mindset you mentioned, but neither does my desire for political experimentation mean I agree with the current setup in every detail.

That's correct. The one-time initial effort provides us with a system that is simultaneously more efficient, less prone to individual-player abuse, and more responsive to minority parties. Thus we have a compromise between three qualities (but no lack of efficiency). Without the overhead we'd have either direct democracy, corporate hierarchy, autocracy, or oligarchy, of which SL already has quite a few, simply because they're so easy to setup.

By definition a democracy is rule by the majority (sometimes pejoratively called "mob rule". Its drawback is that it never serves the minority. The problem with majority rule has long been recognized and it's the reason that the U.S. Congress is bicameral. It is comprised of the House of Representatives where the number of representatives is proportional to the population and the Senate where each state receives two seats. Thus in the Senate the power of the minority is significantly amplified (especially in the case of Wyoming).

So in our case, we do with one body what the U.S. Congress is trying to do with two (so we're technically more efficient than the congress).

~Ulrika~

Guinea Pigs are not really pigs.
Some have doubts as to whether they are what they appear to be at all.

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I prefer hamsters, myself.

God does not appreciate us.