board77

Ah. Well.

Maybe I'll just DO that then.

I'm following Hobby... hi... everything looks good.

Cerin wrote:

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Who DOES post votes normally then?

Ax, according to my recollection from the Constitutional Committee, the person leading the committe discussion posted the ratification thread with introductory remarks in Business.

This is all I found:

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The provisions for convening this committee and the procedures they must follow are stated in full in Article 7. The committee may convene in the Jury Room for discussion, and the final ballot will be presented to the Membership in the Business Forum thread created for that purpose.

Considering Ax is the one who convened the committee and not the Mayor, I think he should present it!

Now THIS is where we put stuff back in the original thread in the Business Room, I believe, according to the Charter, so that the binding vote discussion can resume there.

Could someone with rights open that thread and add the contents of the following post? Thanks. It will also need to be stickied and the title changed to reflect the fact that it's a binding vote.

Dear Members

The Binding Vote committee considering the question of whether the disposition of the “My Presence on These Boards” thread (AKA the wilko thread) could be brought to the membership for a re-vote has determined that it can, according to Paragraph 2 Article 7of the Charter.

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A binding vote cannot be held for a proposition that has been defeated by an earlier vote during the past six months unless a genuine change of circumstances justifies holding an additional vote. It is the responsibility of the Committee to determine whether the proposed vote is allowable.

The committee considered whether members would be voting under different circumstances today than they were when they voted the first time and whether a significant number of voters would have voted differently if today's circumstances had been in effect when they voted the first time. A majority of the committee voted that in this case a genuine change of circumstances does justify holding an additional vote.

The changes of circumstance that were considered were:

1. The fact that during the discussion preceding the first vote the person who started the thread expressed a desire that the thread not be deleted, and this was persuasive for quite a few people; he has since changed his mind after seeing the effects of the thread being left visible and would now prefer to see the thread deleted. It is possible that a significant number would change their vote now that they know that wilko has also changed his mind.

2. So much content has been deleted from the thread that it is now useless as a historical document.

3. The membership was inadvertently misinformed as to the effects of leaving the thread visible. There were two factors to this: First, it was suggested that what outside parties imagined to be in the thread was worse than what was actually in the thread, so that if we wanted to heal wounds, keeping the thread around might be the better strategy. Second, we incorrectly assumed that the parties involved had already seen what was in the thread, whereas they had not (they had only heard about it). As it turned out, our assessment of how inflammatory the thread was and how it would impact particular members was incorrect.

HERE IS HOW THE PROCESS WORKS

All registered members may discuss and vote in this thread.

The complete text of the ballot follows.

Before voting, we continue the discussion in this thread for ten days.

At the end of the discussion, the vote opens and remains open for ten days, two weekends inclusive. The vote takes the form of PMs to the Administrator account.

BINDING VOTE BALLOT FOLLOWS

This is a two-part ballot. Please PM your votes on both parts to Administrator.

QUESTION ONE
The first part is an Instant Runoff Vote (IRV) ballot. Please rank the following four choices according to your preference for the action to be taken on the thread.

A) Leave the thread as is. No board-sanctioned action will be taken on the thread beyond possibly changing the disclaimer (see Question Two).

B) Replace the screen names of individuals indirectly referred to in the discussion with the anonymous placeholder ***** (real-life names have already been removed). The disclaimer may also be changed (see Question Two).

C) Replace names as in B) above, and then move the edited thread to Deleted Thread Storage. Only Rangers and the Mayor can access files in this area. The disclaimer may also be changed (see Question Two).

D) Delete the thread (the thread will be removed permanently; it will not be moved to Deleted Thread Storage). According to the Charter, a thread may be deleted by boardwide vote if deemed necessary to preserve the peace, security or continuance of the board.

My ranked vote for Part One:

1)
2)
3)
4)

QUESTION TWO
The second part is a simple poll, and is dependent on the ballot above. If option D) on Question One is selected by the membership, this question becomes irrelevant. Pick one:

A) Keep the current disclaimer text:

This thread was active during the upheavals on TORC and here at board77 in the first few months of 2005. Please remember as you read that many posts were made in the heat of the moment. Also, please note that this thread is no longer active; the board has moved on from these events. However, the members of board77 have decided that to delete these threads would be counter to our principles of transparency and openness.

B) Replace the current disclaimer text with this text:

This thread was active during the upheavals on TORC and here at board77 in the first few months of 2005 and many posts were made in the heat of the moment. The comments in this and every thread represent the feelings and opinions of the individuals who posted them and are not representative of the viewpoint of the board as a whole. Keeping threads from the period before the board opened is not an endorsement of their contents, but an attempt to operate according to our stated principles of transparency and openness.

My vote for Part Two:

A or B

I'll gladly do it, but just reassure me... you want this placed in the thread titled: binding vote for the committee member input LAST CHANCE, right? Not the another discussion of the wilko thread thread?

Edited to add:

In my eagerness to do something ranger-like, I am going to go ahead with your request since I think logically it would make sense that the thread you want replaced with the ballot is the one about input from the members. Since the committee has reached a decision input from the members would be useless.

Let me know if I change the wrong thread. I'm saving your original post on my hard drive just in care.

I deem the ballot is all right.

I'm curious, though. What is the purpose of discussion? Is that like an election campaign, with posters advocating the option of their choice, or can people still propose changes to the ballot itself?

I might make that an annoucement. It's gotten buried in the Charter Ratification votes.

TED, could you go ahead and make a global announcement sticky to point people to it? Thanks.

Frelga, unlike a charter amendment vote, where the membership could ask for changes, I think we have finished our job and passed the burden to the rest of the board. This is a single-issue vote, not something that governs behavior and such indefinitetly.

And thanks to everyone here for making this go smoothly! And even relatively quickly. I guessed ten days in the beginning, and it was close to that.

Axordil wrote:

Frelga, unlike a charter amendment vote, where the membership could ask for changes, I think we have finished our job and passed the burden to the rest of the board. This is a single-issue vote, not something that governs behavior and such indefinitetly.

That's what I've been hoping to hear.

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And thanks to everyone here for making this go smoothly! And even relatively quickly. I guessed ten days in the beginning, and it was close to that.

You deserve a lot of credit here, Ax, for keeping us on track and moving along, and for being so patient when we were picking and pecking at the wording.

So, are we done?

Frelga wrote:

I'm curious, though. What is the purpose of discussion? Is that like an election campaign, with posters advocating the option of their choice, or can people still propose changes to the ballot itself?

I think I'm agreeing with Ax here, when I say that the discussion is to promote understanding of the issues (or for advocacy), and not for making changes to the ballot (I think the time for that would have been while the committee met).

I'm actually concerned that putting the ballot at the beginning of that other thread is very confusing. Is this mandated by the Charter? Couldn't we have started a fresh thread for the ballot discussion?

Great!

I'm wondering whether we should explain how IRV is counted, right in the next post after the ballot?

The Charter indicates that the discussion should be in the same thread as the vote, so we had to pick between the one its in and the loooooong one that led us here. The short one is preferable, I think.

I will put a link in to the beginning of the thread in the text, and ask for a global announcement with a link to the beginning as well.

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The Charter indicates that the discussion should be in the same thread as the vote

That would mean, in the same thread as the ballot, right? So if you had started a new thread with the ballot, then the discussion would ensue, and they would be in the same thread.

Sorry I've been incommunicado all day. Depositions and stuff. Long day.

I don't believe the Charter says anything about people being able to edit posts in a locked thread. Common sense says that since they can't, they can't.

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Perhaps Voronwe could give us a ruling on this as well, whether we should set aside these requirements because the Binding vote article has not yet been ratified (vote whenever we feel like it, and use 39 as the quorum number) or whether we should try to adhere to them.

Well, we've been trying to follow articles up for ratification. I think we can get around the when to vote provision easily enough if Eru will agree to use her mayoral powers. As for the quorum, I think we should start the discussion with the assumption that we will use the provisions of the new article, which will be either ratified or not ratified by the time this vote actually starts. If it is ratified we should use the quorum provisions. If it is not ratified because it itself did not reach a quorum, I don't know what we should do.

As for where the vote should be held, the as yet unratified article on binding votes says:

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Announcement of the vote, acceptance of volunteers, discussion of the ballot, voting, and announcement of voting results will all take place in the same thread.

Beyond the fact that this provision appears to conflict with the provision in Committees article that says:

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The committee may convene in the Jury Room for discussion, and the final ballot will be presented to the Membership in the Business Forum thread created for that purpose.

it presents an additional dillemna here since that thread was created by Ethel, who is no longer participating in this discussion. I agree with those who say that it would be confusing to have the vote in that thread, as well.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Ax should just start a new thread for the vote. After all, the committee article specifically says that the final ballot should be presented to the Membership in the Business Forum thread created for that purpose. When two Charter provisions conflict, I think we should follow the one that makes the most sense.

Voronwe -

we should put a note in your 'charter issues thread' to clarify this:

Announcement of the vote, acceptance of volunteers, discussion of the ballot, voting, and announcement of voting results will all take place in the same thread.

This paragraph refers to the member discussion ... so that the vote cannot be moved around to prevent people from voting and the results cannot be concealed, etc. We should say "member discussion of the ballot" so that this distinction is clear.

The committee may convene in the Jury Room for discussion, and the final ballot will be presented to the Membership in the Business Forum thread created for that purpose.

This paragraph refers to the committee discussion, so that they can discuss without interruptions.

At the risk of being annoying, I'm just going to copy this post into your other thread.

Jn

If there are no further questions...and I will see about an IRV explanation, hobby...I'm going to suggest we dissolve and adjourn, or perhaps the other way around.

You are never annoying, my dear Jnyusa.

Who gets their Jury Room permissions taken away? The whole committee, or does anyone still them for other threads in the Jury Room?