[EM] July for Electorama! (and figuring out EPOV)

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

(Whoops, I sent this only to Rob the first time around. Let's try that
again...)

On 01/07/2020 07.51, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Hi everyone!
> 
> As some of you might have heard, C4ES is shutting down
> forum.electionscience.org (see
> https://forum.electionscience.org/t/archiving-the-forum-july-30th/697
> for details).  That makes me sad, because it was a more active venue
> than this mailing list.  This ratchets the pressure back up on me to
> find a better mailing list solution than Dreamhost's Mailman 2.x
> (which probably isn't getting ported to Python3 anytime soon).
> 
> I was actually starting to like using the forum software that C4ES has
> been use (Discourse.org), and I'm going to miss being able to send
> plain-text messages while still being able to use **bold** and
> _italic_ without interspersing my plain text with funky punctuation.
> But alas, C4ES doesn't want to moderate the forums anymore.
> 
> This mailing list has always been my personal litmus test for EPOV
> (Electorama Point of View).  Over the past year, I've been calling it
> "EPOV" (for "electowiki POV"), but that sells y'all short.  Who do I
> mean by "y'all"?  I mean the loyal subscribers of the EM-list, some of
> whom have been here since 1996.  We're about to have the 25th
> anniversary of EM-list, so I want to make sure that you all are part
> of the discussion as we define what "EPOV" is.
> 
> "EPOV" is currently defined here:
> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Electowiki:EPOV
> 
> You'll notice that the EM-list's perspective seems to have been
> watered down relative toother forums (e.g. the C4ES forum, or
> /r/EndFPTP over on reddit).  I *was* thinking about asking y'all to
> join me in the big migration over to the C4ES Discourse.org server,
> but since that's shutting down, that won't work at all.

I think there's still a place for EM as a sort of improvisational
research list. Granted, that's probably because that's what I've seen it
as -- I haven't got any published papers to my name, but I can still ask
e.g. how one may prove that a method definitely isn't summable over
every possible way that one may make precinct subtotals.

The more established advocacy groups have their own lists or forums. But
perhaps new groups will grow from here, too, before they become
established enough to create their own forums.

(If there's any "established" advocacy direction to EM itself, I have
the feeling it is Condorcet. But there are so many varieties of
Condorcet! And it's not a particularly *strong* advocacy slant.)

> I have a lot of ideas about how we should modernize our discussions.
> It seems to me that with lots of CGP Grey videos and plenty of
> discussion forums out in the world, the last thing that any of us
> should be doing is building a new piece of forum software. Moreover,
> there are many complicated reasons why

It seems like that sentence got cut off. Complicated reasons why what? :-)

In any case, I'd prefer whatever it is the more modern forum becomes to
also have mailing list support. It would make it easier to move it over,
and keep the general threading format which I think is a good idea. As
far as I know, Discourse is more linear than threaded; is that right?