[Bob Kuczewski]

Hello Fellow Hawks!!!

I'm sorry I've been absent for a few days. I'm currently on a business trip in Pennsylvania, and I haven't had time to get online since Saturday night (Southwest Airlines lost my luggage and I didn't get it until this evening around 6pm). But I'm free tonight (and with my luggage), so I'll look over this topic in more detail and post a more complete response.

But without doing any analysis, I can already say that Bill is correct about us needing standardized procedures on how to vote. That's why these tests are important to help us see problems and come up with solutions. Part of the reason the HGAA failed was that they implemented an online voting system without doing any testing to find its problems or drawbacks.

With regard to the results, since this is a test, we don't really have to come up with any actual results. I can show what I think a good system would do with these votes and anyone else is welcome to suggest what some other system might do. This is part of the discussion on how we can come up with a system that does a better job than what USHPA does and better than what the HGAA tried to do. Better is what we want!!

[Bob Kuczewski]

Over the Christmas break I've been working on an applet to help our voting experiments.

Here's an early version:

Java is disabled.

This program lets you compare pairs of candidates to see how they would do in a "run off" against each other. Just select the two candidate from the drop down boxes (at the top) and it will show you the results of that "virtual run-off". The winner in each ballot will be green (and listed first) while the loser will be red (and listed later in that ballot or not at all). You can easily count up the greens (or first listings) for each candidate pair to see which one would win or lose or tie. Future versions of the program will do that automatically, but it's after 3am, and I'm too tired to finish that tonight.

Here's an example comparing two of the strongest candidates (Lookout Mountain and Torrey Pines). You can count 3 winning (green) votes for Lookout Mountain (Candidate #10) and you can also count 3 winning (green) votes for Torrey Pines (Canidate #1). You can see that mrbirdman57, hbittner, and billcummings all ranked Lookout (10) ahead of Torrey (1). You can also see that JoeF, bobk, and SamKellner ranked Torrey ahead of Lookout. That's 3 on each side. So if those two were to be the only two choices (in a run-off, for example), then they would tie with 3 votes each. Here's the picture of that case:

test_vote_002a.png (7.12 KiB) Viewed 7027 times

Note that this is an unofficial accounting of the votes where I've been fairly lenient about including ballots (even those that came in late or didn't use the proper voting tags). Bill will have the final say on this vote, but I wanted to explore this example to see how this proposed voting system would work in a case with 34 or 35 candidates.

This particular vote (with so many candidates) provides fertile ground for future discussions about the US Hawks voting system. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to write the code to help with this analysis.   

[Bill Cummings]

Oh Boy.
A tie and I have to decide to go with my vote or the other side that didn’t vote my way.
Perhaps voting rules should be designed to nullify the vote of, me in this case, the guy “with the final say,” and let Torrey win the vote.
Or
Have me be like the, “Speaker of the House,” and break any tie. (just how would that work?)
Or
Make a rule (a perk for the guy taking on the job of running a vote) that can break a tie which ever way the voter guy chooses.
Or ---something else.??

[Bob Kuczewski]

Happy New Year Bill!!!

This topic has been a great exercise, and I really appreciate you presiding over it!!



It's important for our organization to remember that not every question needs an answer. It's quite possible that a national organization isn't able to crown a legitimate "favorite flying site". Sure, we could do some hocus pocus with the numbers and arrive at some answer. But what is the value of that answer?

I've been upgrading my software (one of the many side-benefits of this topic), and it currently reports:

Candidate "Torrey Pines" has 32 wins, no losses, and 3 ties.
Candidate "Lookout Mountain" has 34 wins, no losses, and 1 ties.
(yes, I need to work on its grammar)

You could make a case that since Torrey had more ties, that maybe Lookout Mountain should "win". But that still leaves us with a "winner" that would be tied with one of the "losers" in a one-on-one rematch. I find that hard to justify. What that means is that the outcome of a race between two candidates is tainted by the presence or absence of others in the race. We really don't want that because it opens us up to "rigging" the vote through the nomination process. We want a result that's the same no matter how many extraneous candidates are nominated.

But back to my original point ("not every question needs an answer"), we should probably state what will happen in case of a tie right up front. All voting systems can have ties. The voting system that I'm proposing is somewhat more prone to ties than some other systems, but I think that's a good thing. When an organization is not clearly "of one mind" when making decisions, that's often the source of bad decisions. The voting method that I'm proposing is more prone to ties, but that reveals the kinds of uncertainty that should make us rethink our original questions. In this case, I suggested the favorite flying site topic, and I asked Bill to chair the voting. So I take full responsibility for asking what might be considered a "bad question".   

On the other hand, look at all the cool flying sites (and flying ideas) that came from this topic!! Sometimes it's the journey that counts, and I thank everyone who has - and continues - to participate in this one.   

To answer your specific questions Bill, I'm happy with whatever you decide. But I hope this exercise will lead to some good diiscussions about lessons learned and how we can apply them to a voting system that will help us make good decisions for our organization!! That's the prize for our eyes.   

[Bob Kuczewski]

Here's a new improved version (January 3rd, 2014):



















































Java is disabled or your browser does not understand the "applet" tag.

This one shows the results right up front and the votes are now specified in the post (the previous version was hard-coded).

This one also more clearly shows the voter's choices when comparing two candidates. It draws the first choice of the two right after the voter's name so you can look down that first column to quickly verify the count. It also tells you which candidate would win (or tie) in each one-on-one comparison. So if you compare Lookout Mountain (10) to Fort Funston (4), you'll see there were 3 votes for Lookout and 2 votes for Funston (in the column after the voter's names). The actual ballot for each voter follows with those two choices also highlighted (with the winner in that ballot highlighted more brightly).

If you compare nothing (blank) to nothing (blank) you'll see the overall results (this is the default). If you choose one candidate and leave the other one blank, you'll see all the votes for that selected candidate along with their individual wins, losses, and ties. If you choose two different candidates, then you'll see the comparison between them.

You can quote this message to see how the candidates and the ballots are passed to the applet if you'd like to see how this applet is included in a post.

[Bob Kuczewski]

This is a good time to make an observation. If we held a "regular" election (where we each voted for just our favorite candidate without a "none of the above" option), we'd have gotten this outcome:

10      (mrbirdman57)
26      (JoeF )
4      (hbittner)
7      (billcummings )
1      (bobk)
31      (SamKellner)

In other words, we would have had a 6-way tie with "regular" voting!!

But by including a "none of the above" (0) option, that option would have won in this case:

10      (mrbirdman57)
26      (JoeF )
4      (hbittner)
0      (billcummings )
0      (bobk)
31      (SamKellner)

But it would have won with only 1/3 (2 out of 6) votes. So it would have been a minority victory at best.

[Bill Cummings]

Bob,
I may be a little slow here but how do we see the voting results at a glance without dropping down and comparing all of the choices?

I can’t decide which way to go on the “0” vote.
As you pointed out there were enough votes to open up the nominations again to add a late nomination. (When we first selected “0” before our preferences.)

As it is set up so far it looks like we should add and revote with the late nomination included. (Keeping in mind everyone that this was just a test nomination/vote.)

Here is my dilemma. Although you and I put a “0” as our first choice to reopen the nomination for an addition we did it out of altruism.

The down side of this situation is that “Trojans” (People from a camp in opposition to the Hawks--) could become members just to disrupt the hawks voting process.

With so many varied selections just a small group could select “0” and find themselves in the majority and seriously slow up the Hawks voting process.
We didn’t get a strong site as a most favorite. Many were close ties.

Perhaps we should create a one-way street to a voting conclusion.

In other words get the nomination process right to the best of our abilities and then end the comment period and move to a final vote. (No reopening of the nomination process.)

If it looks like we all voted to our own detriment we could do something like a 2/3 vote to overturn the mistake.

PS another minor problem I’m having on my laptop is the posted messages on the Hawks forum are showing me a faded letter “v” and letter “w.”
Am I the only one with this problem?

[Bob Kuczewski]

BILL!!!

I'm glad to see you back!! I was worried that this topic had either driven you away ... or driven you crazy!!    

I may be a little slow here but how do we see the voting results at a glance without dropping down and comparing all of the choices?

You're not slow at all!!! The tool is still somewhat experimental and undocumented (just like this voting system). You can see the overall results when both of the choices are blank. If just one of the choices is blank, then it shows just the votes for the choice that's not blank (as compared to all others). That's not obvious and the tool could use a help feature!!

In this case, selecting both blanks shows that there were two candidates that were undefeated: Torrey and Lookout Mountain. But even though they were undefeated, they both had ties. If Lookout were to run against Torrey, they would tie. That's the only tie for Lookout, but Torrey also tied with "None of the Above" and "Historic Sites". So you could make a case that Lookout was the stronger candidate (with fewer ties). I think that would be a defensible result.

You could also declare it a tie because there was no winner that defeated all the others. In that case, we could end the topic and maybe start a new voting topic on a different subject (or even the same subject) having learned some valuable lessons here.

I can’t decide which way to go on the “0” vote.
As you pointed out there were enough votes to open up the nominations again to add a late nomination. (When we first selected “0” before our preferences.)

As it is set up so far it looks like we should add and revote with the late nomination included. (Keeping in mind everyone that this was just a test nomination/vote.)

Here is my dilemma. Although you and I put a “0” as our first choice to reopen the nomination for an addition we did it out of altruism.

You're exactly right on this one Bill. You and I did vote for 0 to reopen the nomination process out of altruism, and that threw a monkey wrench into the system. But the indeterminate result is probably telling us that this was probably an ill-conceived vote (my ill-conception, not yours). I really like the idea that this voting system exposed that there really is no clear choice that we all agree on. To me that says go back to the drawing board and start again.

The down side of this situation is that “Trojans” (People from a camp in opposition to the Hawks--) could become members just to disrupt the hawks voting process.

This will become a BIG problem if we don't have a way to filter out the "Trojans". So we're going to have to figure out how to do that at some point. In fact, that just gave me an idea for a new voting topic. Maybe we should solicit nominations for ways to keep the Hawks from being "taken over" by people who aren't sincerely interested in a new national hang gliding association. We did have that same problem with the Torrey Hawks since we (hang glider pilots) are getting to be a minority at Torrey Pines. Our Torrey Hawks bylaws allow anyone to join, but to be a voting member, you have to have flown a hang glider at Torrey Pines in the previous 3 years. Since Torrey is an H4 site, that pretty much ensured that only serious HG pilots would be voting members. The Fellow Feathers at Fort Funston have a similar requirement of flying 20 hours (I think) at Funston in the previous year. We might have to do something similar here as well - maybe some kind of logbook verification?

We didn’t get a strong site as a most favorite. Many were close ties.

This was sort of an "acid test" for voting.    But I'm glad we did it because it shows what can happen when you have a lot of diverse opinions. We could always have a rule that we "flip a coin" when elections tie (whatever "tie" means), but I still like the idea that a tie just means that we haven't arrived at a strong solution yet.

Perhaps we should create a one-way street to a voting conclusion.

In other words get the nomination process right to the best of our abilities and then end the comment period and move to a final vote. (No reopening of the nomination process.)

I like this idea. In other words, the 0's don't count unless they actually win.

If it looks like we all voted to our own detriment we could do something like a 2/3 vote to overturn the mistake.

If it looks like we've voted to do something we don't want, we can always have someone start another vote. That's what would happen in a regular Board meeting. If someone didn't like the result, they could make a motion to vote again. If that motion passes, then we would vote again.

PS another minor problem I’m having on my laptop is the posted messages on the Hawks forum are showing me a faded letter “v” and letter “w.”
Am I the only one with this problem?

I haven't had that problem, but I have recently noticed that sometimes when I press "Submit", it doesn't come up with the confirmation screen ("This message has been edited successfully. View your submitted message or Return to the forum last visited"). Instead, it just goes back to the topic. In those cases, my post was NOT submitted, and I've had to use the "Back" button on my browser to go back to the previous page (where my updated post is still sitting) and resubmit it again. I've had to do that a few times now, but every time it ended up completing the submission ... eventually. I'm not sure why it's doing that, and I'd be curious if anyone else is having that problem as well.

With regard to this topic, just let me know what you'd like to do. Your wish is my command.

Mostly, thanks for all the time and effort that you've given this, and I'm glad to see you back!!!

[Bill Cummings]

Hawks,
I see now where Bob’s vote tabulating gives the results. I was thinking that Bob had just written in the votes that were not defeated but in fact his program is what was showing the results.
I am impressed!

As a youngster I asked my dad how anyone could hold a Miss Universe contest like we were watching on TV.
It was a sure bet, at least in my mind, that only contestants from Earth were going to show up.

My dad told me that the organizers didn’t want to come off as holding a contest that was too exclusive so the invitation was to girls everywhere. He went on to tell me that if girls from out of this world didn’t show up they would be giving up their chance to win. All girls would be able to compete but they would have to provide their own transportation. As you can imagine the Miss Universe Contest didn’t fill the hall but all the girls that did attend were quite happy.

Our small six person vote on favorite flying sites reminded me of that story.
At best our test vote shows the six favorite flying sits of all the sites nominated.

That would be the first site selected by all the people voting. These flying sites were numbers: 10, 26, 4, 7, 1, 31. (Go click on the “drop down” of Bob’s tabulator to see the site names.)

So I will recommend these 6 from the 35 listed sites for pilots with limited time or money. (Or both.)
The good news is that even the sites that found themselves in the last position will more than likely put smile on the face of the pilots flying there.

Our Test Vote was a good practice run and I do admit to rereading the test # 1 and Test # 2 threads. From that history I or we can come up with ideas that need some more polish.

I’ll see if I can come up with a simpler nomination and vote on the topic Bob brought up about keeping the Hawks on course.
Thanks everyone for your time on this.

[Bob Kuczewski]

My dad told me that the organizers didn’t want to come off as holding a contest that was too exclusive so the invitation was to girls everywhere.

So I will recommend these 6 from the 35 listed sites for pilots with limited time or money. (Or both.)

Spoken like a true statesman!!   

Thanks for chairing this topic Bill!!