Personal brief 1 : Voting system

Yesterday I proposed to the first degree show meeting of the year that we should run [some of] the executive decision making though a electoral system. And I proposed not to use normal ‘First Past the Post’ because I don’t think it would be appropriate for the context of our show.

This was my presentation: proposal PDF

Our degree show project is unusual for many reasons; in terms of organisation it is unusual because of the impossibility of a power structure. There is no way in which any one member of our course could say that they had more power than another member. Members of our course are all equals and the opinion of any member of the year group is never more or less valid than any other opinion. So how can the decisions be made that are necessary for the show event to occur?

1. A few people steamroller other people into basically doing what they want or think should be done [v likely]
2. Somehow though collective roundtable discussion a consensus of opinion can be decided upon [seems unlikely considering the 180 people in the year]
3. People could vote on all decisions that need to be made and live by the results
4. An elected group is formed and given the mandate and power to make executive decisions
5. I’m sure there are others …

I was concerned that basically the first option will happen, people will take it upon themselves to make decisions and later people will ask:

“when did that happen? – no-one asked me about that”

This happened pretty much countless times on the popupshop project. It pissed me off that decisions were made that I totally disagreed with and yet I heard nothing about them and couldn’t present an alternative until too late. It also pissed me off that parts of my contribution to the shop project, such as logo development, poster design and website were criticized at a later date, as I had no intention of misrepresenting anyone or just doing my own thing when I was working on them. I feel that the lack of communication and of a mandate to make executive decisions really hampered the effective collaboration of the group.

SO

My solution is to create an online voting system that uses a more fair voting system [PR/STV/AV/whatever] that can be used to create a mandate for action inside this project. If more than 50% of the year group officially and formally agree on something it is hard for people to grumble at a later date. They would have known the options and expressed their opinion and not been in the dark.

Also Sion wants to create a collaborative platform for task subdivision and other parts of the show project that would perfectly match with a voting system to make important decisions.

There is still a lot to be worked out…