[EM] recommendations for news group with good polling facilities?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 07:04 PM 8/21/2006, Jan Kok wrote:
>Any recommendations?

Sure. Start a yahoogroup for cheap tools. Yahoogroups have polls. 
Sure, it's limited, but you can do a lot off-line. I.e., you can 
collect data with a poll or database and then analyze it the way you 
like manually or with outside tools.

Beyond that, you can buy domain space. The whole lomaxdesign family 
of domains, including beyondpolitics.org, is based on a reseller 
account at hostvector.com. Many different kinds of open source tools 
are available with easy installation, including wikis (phpwiki and 
tikiwiki), plus other open source tools can be installed. I'd be 
happy to provide domain space to start things up, as you know, where 
there is some possible connection with FA/DP concepts, as there is 
with the Boston Tea Party.

>Anyone know how to reach someone at Yahoo, to try to get them
>interested in providing more polling methods?

There is a mailing list for mailing list managers. It seems that 
yahoo monitors it (the part of this "organization" which is on 
yahoo), or that some people on it have some level of privileged 
access to yahoo management.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EmailList-Managers/
http://www.emaillist-managers.com/
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/emaillist-managers
http://groups.google.com/group/EL-M-ComputerHelp

But my opinion is that there is a great deal which can be done 
*without* sophisticated tools, and when an organization is doing what 
can be done, and it finds that it needs more sophisticated tools, 
*then* it will know much better exactly what is needed. If, for 
example, one is analyzing a proxy list by hand to expand votes, and 
it becomes cumbersome, there is then a need to be filled, and nature 
abhors a vacuum.

Instead what we see, in particular with delegable proxy, is that 
software types argue endlessly about exactly how a system should 
function, should there be restrictions on proxy counts, should there 
be special-focus proxies, should there be alternate proxies, and a 
lot of questions which I think would become moot in actual practice. 
I.e., how many proxies can dance on the head of a pin?

When we are actually using delegable proxy, the tools will follow. We 
don't need tools to use DP; all it takes is a proxy list, and I'm 
quite sure, Jan, that you could write a program to take as input a 
set of votes and expand it with a proxy list.

But the software people want secret ballot, which they think is 
necessary. I'll just note that a New England Town Meeting functions 
totally in the open, there are no secret ballots. Direct democracy, 
actually, and secret ballot are relatively incompatible; the 
cornerstone of direct democracy is the ability of people to 
communicate and compromise. You can't compromise with a secret 
ballot. Votes in Congress aren't secret. You know who favored a 
motion and who opposed it. You can talk to these people to find out 
why, at least theoretically.

I keep saying that DP is most easy to implement in a Free 
Association, because there are no assets to fight over, and thus 
practically no incentive to attempt to coerce votes. FA members can 
be anonymous, assuming the rules allow it; because, again, power is 
not concentrated but remains with the members, there is little harm 
to the association if people set up pretend memberships in order to 
gain proxies, since they will be grabbing a handful of sand: FAs 
function by coordinating efforts, and the false proxies don't have 
any power to exercise, they can only pretend to vote.

Want to use Range Voting? Yahoo polls allow multiple answers. Yahoo 
isn't going to average the results, but the results can be downloaded 
and averaged independently.... Or use a database, with each record 
corresponding to a member and each field to a "candidate." The voter 
can add his or her own record and then fill out the fields, or a 
registrar can set up all the records first. Voters just fill in the 
numbers. Then anyone can download the database into Excel and analyze it....

 From the original Free Association: Keep It Simple, Stupid!