Loomio -> liquid feedback

Why all the formality, paper work, busy work??

It is hardly as if we're going to have a large number of candidates we need to process and choose from!

If it is more than can count on my fingers I'll be astonished!! :-o

In harsh reality, it is likely I'll be able to count all our 2014 candidates on one hand. More or less, we'll take anybody who volunteers and stumps up the cash! (so long as they don't set off any obvious alarm bells)

We have to do it somewhere, why not here?

David:

Why all the formality, paper work, busy work?? <<

David, are you saying that we shouldn't have a formal process for choosing candidates?!? If not Loomio, how would you propose these decisions be made? Unilaterally by the Board? By the 4 person majority you are so scared of at MMORPG?

Little reality check my brother. Running a serious political party is a huge amount of work. Like it or lump it.

I'm all for local autonomy, and where there are local chapters/ branches, they should certainly drive the selection process as @andrewreitemeyer says. But what if there is no local chapter, just one person who becomes a member and puts themselves forward as a candidate? Potential electorate candidates are putting themselves forward to represent the Party and the membership, and I agree with @adambullen that the membership should have some oversight. Loomio seems like the logical way to do that.

I would have thought to be a chapter or branch you would need enough members to be incorporated. That is how we set NORML branched back in the day, make them legal entities. It stops fly by night stuff happening. Getting the requisite numbers for incorporation and having secretary, treasurer, chairperson positions is not easy as we haven't managed it yet. :)

@Strypey, @tommyfergusson nailed my point.

As it is a bunch of busy work for a small gain we'd need volunteers to do this, so until then this is a "nice to have" dream rather than an actual decision that can be made.

I've made this point a few times, we need to keep our dreams in check with reality, and not try to behave like a big well resourced party when we can't because we're tiny.

But you do know about the wellington branch being incorporated, don't you, @robueberfeldt ?

I do indeed don't know. Excellent to hear. Though odd to have a branch do it before the national body!

It seems petty to block the creation of a subgroup to discuss issues around candidates out of fear that nobody will use it. Even if that happened (and I think it unlikely) what's the worst that could happen? David raised exactly the same sorts of objection to inviting the membership to use Loomio at all.

@strypey , you make a serious habit of putting the horse before the cart.

Get the local membership in place first!

Perhaps the Wellington region though could have some kind of local membership level of selection first, but for the rest of the country to do so would be quite ridiculous.

As we're small, we really should just keep this all at a country wide level involving everybody rather than fragmenting it down further for no real reason.

As for your other point, I objected to Loomio on the basis of a whole host of other reasons, which I won't be going into here.

Note: By "subgroup" I'm referring to a feature in Loomio. As with the Policy subgroup, every member on Loomio would be a member of that subgroup unless they didn't want to. It's just a way to keep all discussions of a certain type in one place where they can be easily found. If a discussion thead could work through more than one decision at a time, I would just propose having a discussion thead on candidates, but as it stands, this would create a bottleneck.

we really should just keep this all at a country wide level involving everybody

This is exactly what I'm proposing! A Loomio subgroup would allow members to discuss all candidate decisions in one place. This would include party list rankings and candidates in electorates with no formalized chapter.

Objections should go to the full party.

How else do you propose an objection should go to the full party, and a decision made, other than by Loomio?

I suggest to start a new proposal once the current one will be closing in one hour, that is about opening a group for discussing those matters but refrains from suggesting who should have a final saying.
I would happily agree then.

Back to the original matter of this thread:
The fine people of liquidfeedback.org have just released version 3 of LiquidFeedback. I find it very appealing, actually.

Here is the link to a demo instance to have a play with it:
http://dev.liquidfeedback.org/lf3/

Myfirst impression is a much better design - more intuitive and less clunky

Alana from the loomio team has opened a discussion on the loomio user group that is described like this:

*There’s a free online class from Coursera called Making Better Group Decisions: Voting, Judgement Aggregation and Fair Division, which I have signed up for.

Since by definition many people in the Loomio community are interested in this topic, I was wondering if anyone else might want to sign up and we could host a studygroup here on Loomio, which other people who aren’t able to take the course could also learn from.

Details: Starts 25 August, goes for 7 weeks, requires 1-3 hours/week of study time. The instructor is Eric Pacult of the University of Maryland.

EDIT: There’s a bunch of people interested (yay!) so I’ll set up a subgroup for us before the course begins and we can use it for our study group. If you’re interested, go ahead and sign up for the course and make yourself known in this thread so I know to add you.
*

If you are interested, sign up with the course
https://www.coursera.org/course/votingfairdiv
and check the loomio group:
https://www.loomio.org/d/o98kEFWs/free-online-course-about-group-decision-making-anyone-want-to-do-it-and-form-a-loomio-community-study-group

This comment is also relevant here:
https://www.loomio.org/d/A0mrXzcH/rules-and-processes-for-our-use-of-loomio#comment-170003

Here's an interesting article quoting comments from the creator of the Liquid Democracy concept. Apparently the way LiquidFeedback works is "delegative democracy", not "liquid democracy". What the author describes sounds closer to how Loomio works.

@strypey the link in the above comment is broken. Any idea?

Funny, it's working fine for me. Try again?

Funny, today it worked for me as well. Must have been user error. Indeed a helpful little article. Thanks and Cheers.