Martin Michlmayr Wins DPL 126
Strike writes "The votes for the new Debian Project Leader are in and the tallying is over, results here. Martin Michlmayr comes out on top, winning 4-0 going head to head against the other three candidates (with the fourth win being over "no candidate"). Last year's DPL Bdale Garbee came in 2nd, with Branden Robinson and Moshe Zadka coming in 3rd and 4th. Michlmayr's platform can be seen here."
Outcome (Score:5, Informative)
I would like to thank Moshe Zadka, Branden Robinson and Bdale Garbee for their service to the project, for standing for the post of project leader, and for offering the developers a strong and viable group of candidates.
Total unique votes cast: 488, which is 58.60409% of all possible votes.
Pairwise elections won-lost-tied: Moshe Zadka 1-3-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 428
Bdale Garbee 3-1-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 228
Branden Robinson 2-2-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 238
Martin Michlmayr 4-0-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 226
None Of The Above 0-4-0 votes against in worst defeat/closest victory: 449
1 beats 5: 228 202 = 26
2 beats 1: 428 34 = 394
2 beats 3: 238 221 = 17
2 beats 5: 449 29 = 420
3 beats 1: 385 66 = 319
3 beats 5: 405 65 = 340
4 beats 1: 397 38 = 359
4 beats 2: 228 224 = 4
4 beats 3: 237 226 = 11
4 beats 5: 424 39 = 385
Re:Outcome (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Outcome (Score:4, Informative)
1. My fave guy
2. that other guy who's cool
3. this guy ain't bad
4. no candidate
5. Satan
This kind of ballot can be used in a number of voting methods, like the Borda Count and Plurality. In this case Pairwise Comparison was used.
So, basically, the ballot is simple. The calculations might be a little complex, but that complexity isn't exposed to the voter, which was the problem with the Florida ballot -- the calculations were simple, but the ballot was complex.
Re:Outcome (Score:2)
Round 0: candidate A 45 votes, B 40 votes, C 15 votes. Eliminate C.
Round 1: candidate A 55 votes, B 45 votes. A wins.
I've never seen this weird tabular format with simulated one-on-one contests between candidates. Does anyone pay attention to that data?
Re:Outcome (Score:1)
the one who wins the most compares wins the election.
Re:Outcome (Score:1)
Re:Outcome (Score:2, Informative)
Take for example
acb
acb
bca
bca
cab
with stv A would have won.
but with pairwise(or whaterver it called) C would have won.
It makes sense for a project like debian since it won't be good to have projectleader who isn't the liked by a large part of the developers.
Re:Outcome (Score:1)
Re:Outcome (Score:4, Informative)
11 people vote A,B,C,
10 people vote B,C,A, and
9 people vote C,A,B, then
A beats B (20-10),
B beats C (21-9), and
C beats A (19-11), resulting in a deadlock.
Single Transferable Vote would give
First round: A-11 B-10 C-9
Second round: A-20 B-10, resulting in A winning.
However, as with almost all cases where vote counting methods give different results, such a set of votes would be very unlikely to actually happen; in practice you'll almost always end up with the same result regardless of how you count the votes.
Re:Outcome (Score:2)
No, Debian uses Condorcet [electionmethods.org] voting.
The ordinal ballot, however, is identical to IRV.
Urban Legend (Score:2)
Hogwash. The "problem" with the Democrat-designed, voter-approved Florida ballot was not "complexity". As was demonstrated repeatedly in the aftermath, children as young as 8 had no trouble using a butterfly ballot. Here's at least one summary [humaneventsonline.com]. If anyone had problems with that ballot, it was through gross incompetence, and a total unwillingness to ask for ass
Re:Urban Legend (Score:1)
Re:Urban Legend (Score:2)
Clever, but no.
Re:Urban Legend (Score:1)
Re:Urban Legend (Score:2)
People have the strange idea that pure democracy is the best of all possible political systems. It isn't, unless you happen to share the majority's opinions. Otherwise, it may be just as tyrannical as a Stalin.
debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:4, Interesting)
I imagine the 2000 Presidential candidates would be:
GW Bush
Al Gore
Pat Buchanan
Ralph Nader
No One
It would require each voter casting 4+3+2+1=10 votes, so of course it wouldn't happen, but I imagine that the "No one" option would probably finish very strongly, perhaps even winning the election. (I think Scott Adams discussed that if one of the major parties nominated a bag of lettuce, it would capture 40% of the popular vote because it "has good character").
Where this sort of voting might actually useful (if voters wouldn't mind) would be in primaries, where definitive preferences for certain candidates would be shown, and other candidates would find out if their campaign will go anywhere much faster....maybe. Then again, this would require voters being well informed about each candidate, and we all know that isnt gonna happen.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
None of the above (Score:1)
The 1985 comedy, "Brewster's Millions" took this idea to its peak, when a wacky millionaire determined to lose all his money starts an ad capaign asking for people to vote for "none of the above" :)
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:3, Interesting)
Australia uses a system not dissimilar, whereby people rank their choices in canidates. Everyone's first place choices are examined, and the canidate with the fewest 1st place choices is eliminated. Those that voted for the least popular canidate have their votes
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:2)
We just talked about this in history class! This was already tried in renaissance Italy. It does not work, because people are selfish. They will try to maximize their influence by not voting fairly.
Actually, the Condorcet method used by the Debian project is pretty much immune from manipulation, in contrast to our current system which *strongly* discourages people from voting "honestly" if their preferred candidate isn't one of tha major parties.
The Condorcet method is less than 100 years old, and the
Re:debian political parties vs. a national ones (Score:3, Informative)
These are not trivial documents, and they're chosen at the same time as the party's official candidate (at the national convention). The candidates themselves also publish volumes of press releases and opinion papers. These papers might not be quite as pleasant the DPL platforms, but they cover more mat
Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:2)
Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:2)
Total Anarchy... and It's great!
Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure you're being facetious, but I'll bite, For Educational Purposes. :)
France had an interesting problem, before a popular political reform. They had 7+ candidates in one presidential election, most likeable, with a few unpleasant and one racist downright-unlikable person. France, at this time, used the same voting system we do, called plurality voting [wikipedia.org]. I bet you can guess who won. Of all the voting systems known, plurality is the most likely to give a false representation of voter preference. France no longer uses plurality voting in presidential elections, though they don't use Condorcet's Method either.
Debian uses Condorcet's Method [wikipedia.org]. In this method, voters rank all candidates in their order of preference, and candidates can even tie for nth place on the ballot. The system considers which candidate is prefered over whom, and not their actual "rank" on the ballot. That is, if you tied four candidates for first place, and a fifth candidate for second place, you are only voicing that you prefer any of those four over the fifth candidate.
The election is resolved by running every candidate against every other candidate. That means, given n candidates, (n^2)-n "pair-wise" elections are held. Given 5 candidates, 20 elections. Given 8 candidates, 56 elections. Think of it this way: Given Bush or Gore, who would you pick? Given Bush or Perot, who would you pick? Given Bush or Sharpton, who would you pick? There can be multiple ways to chose the winner of the election. The candidate with the most victories is considered the winner. The candidate with the fewest losses is considered the least disliked. Most of the time, there is not a tie, and these two are the same candidate.
Tallying the votes is a little more obtuse. The easiest way to manually tally the votes uses a grid. From top the bottom and left to right, list the candidates. The rows will be the runners, and the columns will be the opponents. Going left to right, top to bottom, mark each box where the runner was prefered to the opponent. If they were tied, do not mark the box. Do this for each ballot. You will then add the grids resulting from each ballot. Consider each mark a '1', and each unmarked box a '0'. The result is the "Sum Grid".
From the "Sum Grid", you can draw a number of conclusions. Each grid shows the number of voters that prefer the runner to the opponent. Compare the runner's votes to the opponent's votes. The runner with the most victories can be considered the most popular. When there's a tie for first place, the candidate with the least losses could be considered a good choice--the least disliked. You could also add the numbers from each row for an indescriminate popularity vote. The popularity choice doesn't draw any useful conclusions, and can be any candidate except the one with the most losses. There are other possibilities. Condorcet's largest problem is resolving ties for first place.
"None" could be an option.
slight clarification (Score:3, Interesting)
While having the most victories is a possible gauge, one major problem (among others) is that it doesn't weigh victories by importance. For example, if Bush is preferred to 12 minor candidates, and Gore is preferred only to Bush a
clarification to your clarification (Score:2)
Yup, there's actually a name for that: Copeland's method [wikipedia.org]. Not nearly as well known as Condorcet's, but is nice in that the tiebreaker is more intuitive to those that are used to sports matchups.
Rob Lanphier
(who is looking for an excuse to plug Electorama [electorama.com], a site about electoral reform)
Re:slight clarification (Score:1)
But you're then making the assumption that Gore is somehow inherently "better" than the 12 minor party guys for some reason. Why is the Gore victory "more important"? Why are the terms "Democ
Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:2)
Re:Congratulations to the winner ... (Score:1)
Given Bush or Gore, who would you pick?
Gore.
Given Bush or Perot, who would you pick?
Perot.
Given Bush or Sharpton, who would you pick?
Sharpton.
Come on were geeks (Score:5, Funny)
DPL result;
result =rand(time(0)) % 4;
This is how it should work.
Re:Come on were geeks (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Come on were geeks (Score:1)
If you look at my reply rand(time(0)) % 3 + 1 would add 1 to the 0-2 to make it 1-3 which would equal the numbers assigned to each set of characters in in enum.
Re:Come on were geeks (Score:2)
correction
result = rand(time(0)) % 3 + 1;
I forget there were 3 not 4 candidates and since the enumurator started at 1 then I would need to add 1 to prevent the results from being off by 1.
Re:Come on were geeks (Score:5, Interesting)
enum DPL { Martin_Michlmayr = 0, Branden_Robinson, Moshe_Zadka, DPL_CANDIDATES };
DPL result = rand(time(NULL)) % DPL_CANDIDATES;
Note how I do not explicitly assign a "proper" value to the DPL_CANDIDATES sentry value, that is the point since now the compiler automatically assigns the correct value. The initial =0 assignment is optional, but nice for extreme clarity IMO. As you can see, this also removes the need to add 1 to the result, since the modulo operator will now work as intended. Um. Apologies of course if you already knew all this, I just felt like geeking out a bit.
Re:Come on were geeks (Score:3, Funny)
How did he REALLY win? (Score:4, Insightful)
"...Bdale speaks of communication... community at large was not well informed at all of what was going on..."
"...I didn't see many new thoughts in Branden's platform...he has had (pointless) arguments with virtually anyone in the project who is doing important stuff...I doubt he would be an effective leader..."
The true secret to success... clever condescending trash talking.
Recount!! (Score:5, Funny)
already covered (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Recount!! (Score:2, Funny)
percent (Score:1, Informative)
Not unless fractional votes are allowed.
Re:percent (Score:2)
Re:percent (Score:1)
Let's see this simple ficticious scenario:
3 possible votes.
2 votes were cast.
2/3 = 33.3333333%
Conclusion: WTF? Which moron cast the fractional vote?
Go back to school and pay attention in class this time.
Cheers,
e.
Re:percent (Score:1)
You miss the point entirely, edinho sweetie. But don't you worry your pretty little head; I will explain it to you. 488 is not 58.60409% of any integer. So unless fractional votes are allowed, 488 cannot be 58.60409% of the total.
A choice of lesser evils? (Score:2, Interesting)
So it seems like the main reason he won would have to be disillusionment with the other candidates. With Bdale being the incumbent and responsible for whatever has seemingly gone wrong over th
Re:A choice of lesser evils? (Score:1)
- He says Debian needs leadership and coordination, this is where he sees his main role. IMHO something that sounds good to me
- He wants to find a solution to the release cycle problem
- In fact, most of the issues he lists are of organizational value and are less technical, maybe that's why you seemed to have overlooked them?
I have to agree though that he does spend a great deal of time talking about his per
Neato Keen (Score:2, Offtopic)
I personally prefer Gentoo over Debian, but Debian is still a damn solid distro and I hope they continue to do well.
IN SOVIET DEBIAN (Score:4, Funny)
*ducks*
Sad (Score:1, Interesting)
2 beats 3: 238 221 = 17
4 beats 2: 228 224 = 4
4 beats 3: 237 226 = 11
which translated to English means that Bdale won over Branden by 17 votes and Martin won over Bdale by 4 votes and over Branden by 11. That's *fscking* close for this kind of voting system.
Bar Moshe, Martin is probably the worst DPL candidat
Re:Sad (Score:1)
Hopefully, Martin will do some visible leadership, leading to real accomplishments, and not just be an "evil catbert";-)
Stuffing the ballot box... (Score:3, Funny)
Let's see if I have this straight:
1) Leaders for open source projects are elected.
2) The election is held electronically.
3) The server recieving and tallying those votes is running open source software.
4) Thus, the firewalls, auditing utilies, and other security measures on that server are possibly written by the very same people who are doing the voting or perhaps even the candidates themselves.
With that in mind, can we really be sure Michlmayr received all those votes or is he just really good at coding back doors?
</tongue firmly planted in cheek>
(In all seriousness, though, congrats to Martin and all the other candidates. You've got a lot more courage than I, taking on a task that big. Best of luck!)
Alcohol (Score:1)
So anyway (Score:2)
Re:I (Score:3, Funny)
Hah hah.... I can just see the presidential debates for that:
Martin Michlmayr: I propose a 3 tiered attack onto terrorism. Using the latest advancements in XP (Extreme Power) we will have this baby delivered on time on budget... unlike Bush over here who's going to be many many months past his deadlines, and billions off his initial cost estimates...
Re:Yup (Score:5, Informative)
If there weren't a number of geeks very concerned about things like licensing we wouldn't have Linux in the first place. We might have a nice kernel, but that's a long shot from a Free OS.
Debian's view is pretty simple: "If the software we use isn't Free, then someone can legally ask us to stop using it. Therefore, our operating system and its tools will always be Free, and no parts of it will ever depend on any software that is not Free." If that's not important to you keep using Red Hat, or Gentoo, or rolling your own. But for fuck's sake spend a little time researching who writes the tools you use before you try to make lame jokes about them. I suppose you're the type to bitch about the ACLU being a bunch of extremists but posted a "Microsoft sucks" comment when they try to censor Slashdot, eh?
Re:Yup (Score:1)
Re:Yup (Score:1)
Re:Yup (Score:3, Interesting)
I like very much that Debian is about free software, but I am at best ambivalent about all our "legal experts".
My solution to that: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yup (Score:2)
It's all iffy. Has the GPL ever been put to the test in the courts? I don't believe a case has gone to trial yet.
Re:Yup (Score:2, Troll)
Frankly, I think a lot of people would hardly see that as an insult. If I say "most rabbis love long, complicated arguments about interpretations of religious law, though most people don't care in the least about such questions", I think you'd find a lot of rabbis and theologians that would agree. So?
Obviously, I really am not interested in spending hours of my time arguing over the particular classification
Re:Yup (Score:2)
See, that is why philosophers are needed there. You are clearly not one, so you forgot to add the 200 pages where you define "s
Re:Yup (Score:2)
If you want rigorous definitions, you'll be working entirely within an abstract system. If you want to do anything that at all interacts with the real world, you have to fudge your definitions at the lowest level. I can take the Cartesi
Re:Yup (Score:1)
Re:Yup (Score:2)
I really should have put a smiley at the end of my first paragraph. This was meant to be an ironic jab against the verbosity which seems to often occur both at debian-legal and in philosophic circles. Sorry. In fact, I really think you are very right esp. with the first two sentences of the post I answered to.
So the reason you prefer GPL instead of BSD is that Microsoft might come out with a better product for a
Re:Yup (Score:1)
Re:Yup (Score:2)
I wasn't talking about Debian's views. I was responding to the very specific claim of the parent:
If there weren't a number of geeks very concerned about things like licensing we wouldn't have Linux in the first place. We might have a nice kernel, but tha
Chewing... bah, yuck, tastes bad. (Score:2)
Re:Chewing... bah, yuck, tastes bad. (Score:2)
It's hard enough merging in changes to *existing* OSS repositories if other people are constantly checking in new things to CVS (I remember one weekend I spent revising my patches three times because the CVS maintainer kept adding other patches that broke mine by the time I got my patches up to date with his four-hour-old code.)
Re:Yup (Score:2)
scripsit 0x0d0a:
The main problem with your argument here, if I may be so bold, is that you're ignoring the workings of the
Re:Yup (Score:1)
I have never seen that put better! Thank you!
Re:Yup (Score:2)
I also get fed up of being harassed for doing philosophy
Re:Yup (Score:1)
Re:Keeping up the Debian tradition (Score:1)
WTF.. All that gui shit on install is just eye candy.
I like text mode installers.
If they start showing pics of some sexy ass chicks on install!
Then I am all for gui.. Hmmm or just gui. oooH
Re:Keeping up the Debian tradition (Score:1)
Post constant drivel to Linux advocacy sites about the total superiority of your distribution in all areas. Maintain staunch arrogant composure even in the face of massive irrelevance to the Linux community at large, and generally declining interest even in key geek userbase.
this is so right on the money. i'm sure that 50% of debian users use it because they were deluded into thinking that using debian made them l33t. it's all linux people! a case in point, at my work we've had mandrake users help out