[Members] Memberbot

[Kevin Smith]

On 12 Sep 2006, at 00:16, Chris Mullins wrote:
>>> Existing software is the way to go...
>
>> I think the question of allowing the voting
>> over XMPP is a large part of the voting process.
>
> Sure, from a protocol purists point of view, it would be nice - but I
> would much rather see our effort directed toward other things.  
> Building
> a vote-taking bot is only useful 4 times per yet. Many other  
> project the
> JSF considers are, I think, considerably more beneficial.

I think the most important thing is getting a system that's fair. At  
the moment the memberbot method is horribly horribly biased towards  
the first five candidates: despite being one of the very strongest  
candidates, I'd be very suprised if Remko (the last candidate,  
alphabetically) manages to get a fair proportion of votes...my  
suspicion is that the new council will be four of the first five  
candidates, arranged alphabetically, plus PSA, who is something of a  
special case.

So whether we move to a web system, which I have no great objection  
to, or we make a new memberbot, which I've indicated to PSA I'm  
willing to have a look at, I think we quite desperately need to  
implement a fairer system (simply randomising the order of candidates  
would penalise all candidates equally, which is good enough at this  
stage, I think).

/K



-- 
Kevin Smith, PhD Student, Computer Science, Exeter University
http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/people/kismith
Psi XMPP client project leader - http://psi-im.org