Voting systems

 General, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jul 032017
 

In Canada, where I live, the vot­ing sys­tem for the par­lia­ments is the easy to under­stand, but blunt, first past the post (FPTP) sys­tem (also called plur­al­ity vot­ing). The per­son who wins the most votes (a plur­al­ity) wins the seat, wheth­er they get over 50% or under 30%. I believe that it’s time we had a sys­tem that gives more people a more nuanced say in the gov­ern­ment they get; tac­tic­al vot­ing of vari­ous forms in a FPTP sys­tem only goes so far. For my own bene­fit I’ve writ­ten up the vot­ing sys­tems of 3 oth­er coun­tries in which I’ve lived. I don’t have a firm opin­ion on which one I prefer (yet).

Germany

At the Fed­er­al level in Ger­many, the vot­ing sys­tem is a ver­sion of a mixed-mem­ber pro­por­tion­al sys­tem: voters get two votes. One is for a dir­ect can­did­ate (approx­im­ately half the seats), and works by the plur­al­ity (FPTP) sys­tem. The oth­er is where the voter votes for a party. Each party has a list, and the appro­pri­ate num­ber from each party list is deemed elec­ted, depend­ing on the num­ber of votes the party got. There is a threshold for the list votes; parties have to get over 5% of the vote to get any seats via the second (list) vote, unless more than three dir­ect can­did­ates from that party are elected.

This sys­tem was set up to bal­ance many aims. Among them are the prin­ciple of equal votes (each vote must have equal weight), dis­cour­age small parties while allow­ing them, and encour­age bal­ance between vari­ous polit­ic­al views. It tends to lead to coali­tion gov­ern­ments, and is good for find­ing consensus.

Australia

Aus­tralia uses pref­er­en­tial, or ranked, vot­ing sys­tems. The voter ranks the can­did­ates in order of pref­er­ence. If one can­did­ate gets 50% + 1 (or more) first pref­er­ence votes, they are elec­ted. If not, the can­did­ate who received the few­est first pref­er­ence votes is elim­in­ated from the list, and their second pref­er­ences are dis­trib­uted. This pro­cess con­tin­ues until one can­did­ate does have 50% + 1 or more votes. There’s a vari­ation for the Sen­ate that I’m not going into.

Ranked vot­ing gives people a chance to vote for a can­did­ate they know won’t win, and give the second pref­er­ence to a main­stream can­did­ate, which makes it bet­ter than FPTP tac­tic­al vot­ing. One down­side is that you have to rank all can­did­ates in order, and it is quite pos­sible to miss a num­ber, or make some oth­er mis­take. There are some people who num­ber from 1 down the page, so the bal­lot has to be designed to take that ‘don­key vote’ into account.

New Zealand

New Zea­l­and uses a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of mixed-mem­ber pro­por­tion­al rep­res­ent­a­tion to Ger­many. (No, I’m not going into detail on the pre­cise dif­fer­ences.) Each voter has two votes: one for a dir­ect can­did­ate, and one for a party. The party vote determ­ines the over­all num­ber of seats each party is entitled to. There is a threshold, as for Ger­many, of 5% for the party vote, or one dir­ect can­did­ate elected.

There are also a cer­tain num­ber of seats reserved for the Māori elect­or­ate; those use the same vot­ing system.

Per­son­ally, I think any of these sys­tems would be bet­ter than the cur­rent FPTP sys­tem we have.

Northern Voice 2012

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jun 262012
 

This year’s North­ern Voice was held down­town, and was smal­ler than the last couple of years. I like the small con­fer­ence per­son­ally, it’s easi­er to chat with lots of dif­fer­ent people, the lines at regis­tra­tion aren’t as long, and the con­fer­ence as a whole feels more per­son­al. This is the strength of North­ern Voice for me, it’s a pleas­ant con­trast to large con­fer­ences where key­notes are sold to the spon­sors and there are advert­ising ban­ners every­where. Yes, North­ern Voice has spon­sors who show up and have a pres­ence and maybe even a table, but they are all respect­ful of the spir­it of the con­fer­ence. For which I, at least, am grateful.

I spent the first bit of the con­fer­ence help­ing out on the regis­tra­tion table. A cer­tain amount of hec­tic, but not too bad. I then mod­er­ated Martha Rans’ talk on Copy­right for Cana­dians did a good job, I thought, of giv­ing inform­a­tion without over­whelm­ing every­one. The Artists Leg­al Out­reach site has more in-depth inform­a­tion, in what they call toolkits.

Lunch at the W2 cafe was great and the big wooden circles in the middle of the atri­um space were full of people chat­ting while bal­an­cing plates and glasses. After lunch I sat in on Moose­Camp for a while, knit­ting and listen­ing and relax­ing. And singing with Nancy and the ukuleles. I really must get back to singing, it’s been a long time since I sang regularly.

Anoth­er import­ant talk was Daniel Cowen’s talk on pri­vacy. A lot of the sub­ject mat­ter was famil­i­ar to me from my work at Sun, where I was part of a pri­vacy and iden­tity group, but Daniel took it a step fur­ther by see­ing how much someone without spe­cial­ised tools or know­ledge could find out about someone online. In four hours they had a wor­ry­ing amount of inform­a­tion about a woman they code-named “Tara”, enough to run any num­ber of social engin­eer­ing attacks or com­prom­ise any “secret ques­tion” sys­tems. People in the ses­sion were genu­inely shocked at just how much inform­a­tion is avail­able online, and how many details, innoc­u­ous in them­selves, can be added together.

Fri­day ended with the wine tast­ing and party in the atrium.

Sat­urday dawned bright and early with Blaine Cook’s won­der­ful key­note, cel­eb­rat­ing diversity in cul­ture, life, and tech­no­logy plat­forms in the face of glob­al­isa­tion and mar­ket forces. He tied togeth­er archi­tec­ture, rain­forest, and people fight­ing to save their cul­ture with the dom­in­a­tion by large plat­forms such as Face­book and Twit­ter to encour­age diversity and independence. 

Shane Birley’s key­note was of a dif­fer­ent style but had some of the same under­ly­ing themes, cel­eb­rat­ing indi­vidu­al voice, chart­ing his per­son­al jour­ney online, and encour­aging all of us to try out new ways of com­mu­nic­at­ing and shar­ing who we are. All delivered in inim­it­able Shane style, of course!

All in all, it was a lot of work and I was exhausted by the end of the two days, but it was all worth­while. The energy and enthu­si­asm was obvi­ous with all the dis­cus­sions and inter­ac­tions and it’s also been great to see all the tweets and blog posts continue.

Northern Voice 2009

 Conference, Vancouver  No Responses »
Feb 222009
 

I’m slowly recov­er­ing from the whirl­wind that was North­ern Voice this year (I’m one of the organ­isers). All our hard work paid off, we had the usu­al last-minute glitches but every­one seemed to enjoy them­selves, to make new friends and con­tacts, to learn new things, to dis­cuss issues they care about, and to have fun. 

On Fri­day I spent most of my time on the regis­tra­tion desk, apart from intro­du­cing the con­fer­ence and listen­ing to Stew­art But­ter­field’s key­note. Sat­urday was a little dif­fer­ent; I made it to lots of ses­sions (both key­notes, Aid­rie’s pan­el, my own pan­el, bits and pieces of oth­er talks/panels). What I took away from all was a sense of com­munity, a sense that the people attend­ing are truly inter­ested in shar­ing their know­ledge and exper­i­ences, in being genu­ine. Even though some blog from a purely per­son­al stand­point, and oth­ers from a pro­fes­sion­al, there was dis­cus­sion about how to be genu­ine, how to show who you are with­in whatever lim­its you find reas­on­able (some people blog about their chil­dren, oth­ers don’t, for example). I’m look­ing for­ward to watch­ing the videos of the ses­sions I did­n’t man­age to make it to; we only had three ses­sions con­cur­rently but lots of good top­ics. The energy in the whole space was amazing. 

Sat­urday night after we got home, we found Van­couver was in the top ten for two trend­ing Twit­ter top­ics: North­ern Voice and the Canucks. As someone tweeted (sorry, can­’t find it now), that really shows that Van­couver people under­stand how to use these tools for com­mu­nic­a­tion. I feel proud, as one of the organ­isers of North­ern Voice, to do my little bit to help, by giv­ing people who care about these things an oppor­tun­ity to get togeth­er and dis­cuss them. And it’s fun — at a Ser­i­ous Con­fer­ence we could nev­er get away with put­ting out a bas­ket of yarn and telling people to make their own lan­yards (yes, we had some of those white elast­ic things for those uncom­fort­able with the notion). Lots of people grav­it­ated to the bright fluffy stuff, or used mul­tiple strands, cre­at­ing their own bit of wear­able art. And then there was the Moose col­lec­tion — Rahel Bail­lie donated her col­lec­tion of moose as a fund-raiser for the con­fer­ence, so we had these moose statues and ties and kitsch spread over one corner of the regis­tra­tion desk. Again, not some­thing you can do at a Ser­i­ous Con­fer­ence. Which does­n’t mean to say we did­n’t talk about ser­i­ous top­ics, there were lots of those, and lots of dis­cus­sion about them. 

I’m already look­ing for­ward to next year’s North­ern Voice.

Snow and snow

 General, Vancouver  No Responses »
Dec 312008
 

We spent Christ­mas and a few days either side in Sakat­chewan, land of ‑27 C days and even colder nights. But, as it turns out, little snow. Driv­ing along High­way 1 you could see the stubble of plants stick­ing out of the slim white cov­er­ing, giv­ing the hori­zon a green-brown tinge. There was more snow in sheltered places, dry and feath­ery, the sort of snow that does­n’t get you wet when you fall in it as it brushes off so easily.

Com­ing home to Van­couver it was a dif­fer­ent story. We missed out on being there for the almost-record snow­falls (I gath­er we only need anoth­er 2 cm to beat the record set in 1964), but enough remained on the ground to require lots of snow-shov­el­ling. Maybe next year I’ll break down and get a real snow shovel with bet­ter ergo­nom­ics; my back muscles are groan­ing using our emer­gency fold­ing one with its too-short handle. Snow at tem­per­at­ures around zero C is wet and sticky, not at all feath­ery, and it does­n’t brush off eas­ily. In places the snow has the choppy look of whipped egg whites that have star­ted to break down, in oth­ers like smooth piles of icing sug­ar, 60 cm (2 feet) or more thick. On the roads it’s a dirty grey col­our, piled high in spots, inter­spersed with pock­ets of water that can­’t make it to the storm drain and pock­ets of ice where the sun can­’t reach. 

It was the first coast to coast white Christ­mas since 1971, and we’re in the middle of anoth­er snow­fall warn­ing with snow fore­cast for the next three days (which should eas­ily break that record). I’m glad I work from home.

A Week in August

 Conference, Food and Wine, Technology, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jul 242008
 

It seems that August is con­fer­ence sea­son, at least for me. More pre­cisely, one week in August. First Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal (for which the online regis­tra­tion is clos­ing next Fri­day) August 12–15, and then Vinocamp here in Van­couver, at the UBC Botan­ic­al Garden, on August 16th. I’m speak­ing at the former, and help­ing organ­ise the lat­ter (for which num­bers are lim­ited to 120, so don’t wait too long to register). The premise for Vinocamp is a friendly con­fer­ence about wine, put on by a bunch of tech­ies; this is its first year. Both con­fer­ences should be fun! Enter­tain­ing as well as edu­ca­tion­al, and a cer­tain amount of good food and wine in both loc­a­tions. I can cer­tainly think of worse ways to spend a week in August.

Copyright for Canada

 Family, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jun 192008
 

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion in the papers about the newly-tabled Bill on Cana­dian Copy­right; suf­fice to say there are lots of issues with it and it needs to be sent back and turned into some­thing that meets the needs of the cit­izens and res­id­ents of this coun­try. If you’re liv­ing in Canada, I’d recom­mend you read some of Michael Geist’s blog, par­tic­u­larly the sum­mary of last week, and then email your MP about the issues that con­cern you the most. For me, it’s the poten­tial that play­ing DVDs from a region oth­er than Canada could viol­ate the law. If I’ve bought the DVDs leg­ally, or had them giv­en to me, why should play­ing them viol­ate the law? Why should get­ting a cell phone unlocked viol­ate the law? Why should back­ing up my CDs viol­ate the law? This is one of the few issues I can remem­ber where it seems that every news­pa­per has the same tone to the edit­or­i­al — and it isn’t com­pli­ment­ary to the government.

Mind you, my loc­al MP isn’t exactly known for listen­ing to his con­stitu­ents (there’s still a lot of loc­al anger at his cross­ing the floor after being elec­ted), so who knows how much good my email (a heav­ily edited ver­sion of the one at that used to be found at http://www.copyrightforcanadians.ca/action/firstlook) will do.

Update: it looks like the Min­is­ter sup­posedly in charge, isn’t — Cana­dian Industry Min­is­ter lies about his Cana­dian DMCA on nation­al radio, then hangs up — Boing Boing.

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