[Election-Methods] Election Methods Interest Group, please join.

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electionmethods/join

If you are interested in election methods, please consider joining 
the Election Methods Interest Group though the link above, or by 
sending a piece of mail to electionmethods-subscribe at yahoogroups.com 
and responding to the confirmation mail.

If it develops that there is more traffic here than you wish to 
receive, you could set your subscription to Special Notices, which 
shuts off traffic but still allows you access when you want it, and 
still allows the group to send you a message subject to moderator 
approval (which will itself be subject to group decision, Special 
Notices will not ordinarily be sent without a group decision to do so.)

Registration with this list by election methods experts is especially 
invited. From the basic description on Yahoo:

>This is a mailing list and group for the discovery, measurement, and 
>expression of consensus among those interested in election methods. 
>Except as expressed formally through polls and consensus documents, 
>with the broadest possible participation and representation, this 
>group has no opinion on any issue of controversy and no outside 
>affiliation. Affiliations of members and officers should not be 
>taken as representing, in any way, the position of this group, which 
>remains, as a group, rigorously impartial with respect to any controversy.

Part of the purpose of this group is to discover consensus among 
election methods experts with regard to various assertions that are 
sometimes made on behalf of that community. "According to election 
experts," is sometimes stated with no evidence whatever being 
presented that even the majority of election experts, much less the 
consensus implied, agrees with the statement which follows.

EMIG is a Free Association with Delegable Proxy, which allows, for 
example, a busy expert or other person to join and, without 
necessarily personally participating, weight polls or filter 
discussions through a proxy. Many people who might otherwise have an 
interest in the subject of an organization avoid joining because of 
the time that participation can involve. This is an attempt to solve 
that problem. Means will be provided for members to name a proxy to 
stand in for them when appropriate. Because EMIG is a Free 
Association, it accumulates no power and cannot bind its members, it 
solely exists for communication and the measurement of consensus, and 
other than with respect to its own internal issues, where it seeks 
the broadest possible consensus, it imposes no decision on anyone, 
and it refrains from expressing a group opinion on any outside 
controversy, including controversies over election methods.

Nonetheless, it may poll its members to measure agreement with 
various possibly controversial questions. These polls may be 
reported, provided that the reporting is complete, providing 
reference to the complete report on the question, which would include 
poll data and minority reports, if submitted.

Initially, standard deliberative process will be used, as adapted for 
on-line mailing lists, for the presentation of any questions for 
poll, and the founding moderator is Abd ul-Rahman Lomax; however, it 
is not his desire to continue long in that position, so nominations 
for moderators will be in order at any time. Polls are initially set 
as being created by moderators only, because, properly, no poll 
should be taken without group consent, for answers can depend 
critically on the exact wording of questions, and polls can exhaust 
the patience of members.

It is expected that EMIG will develop documents expressing the 
collective opinion of those knowledgeable about election methods, 
done according to the Wikipedia concept of Neutral Point of View, 
which allows the expression of opinions if they are qualified as such 
and attributed. Documents would likely be developed using wiki tools 
such as those used by Wikipedia and, in fact, Wikipedia itself may be 
used to create draft documents with all the power of MediaWiki. This 
list and its proxy tools would then be used to measure and report 
consensus regarding any controversial aspects of the issue under consideration.

It should be emphasized that membership in the Election Methods 
Mailing List is open to all interested in the topic. Databases, 
however, may be developed which reflect the general community opinion 
regarding the qualifications of members and thus a definition of 
"expert" may be developed, so that polls can be reported separately 
as "general opinion" and "expert opinion."

If we are careful about how we approach this, documents approved by 
EMIG will more truly qualify as "peer-reviewed" than any article in 
any known academic journal, and thus can be the basis of further 
citation and use. Indeed, the immediate occasion for the formation of 
EMIG is the need of Wikipedia for reliable sourced information, and 
the lack of any standards to by which the extensive informal 
research, which exists in this field, can be vetted and used, until 
the quirky and slow process of formal academic publication manages to 
catch up with the state-of-the-art, which can take many years.

With permission, members of EMIG may submit documents created jointly 
for formal publication in existing journals, where this is considered 
appropriate and acceptable to the journals. In this case, the 
permitted member may be listed as an author of the article, provided 
that full attribution is made to all those who participated in the 
creation of the document, which is satisfied by reference to a wiki 
history file.

All aspects of EMIG are subject to the approval of the members and 
may be modified as the membership determines, including all aspects 
described in this initial message. Abd ul-Rahman Lomax, the founding 
trustee, may exercise ad-hoc veto power, but pledges never to use 
this as a means of asserting his own opinions other than those which 
can be seen as an organizational promise. Even with respect to what 
he might see as a violation of that promise, he would not restrain a 
determined and genuine majority from altering any aspect of the 
organization, beyond acting to protect the rights of a dissenting 
minority (which could involve a fission of the organization, with no 
bias in that process toward any descendant organization).

These are FA/DP concepts, see http://beyondpolitics.org/wiki for 
further information.