MJ Ray posted a couple of short summaries as to how the election would have turned out if alternate voting systems had been used. A couple of people asked about others, so here's a nice long list:

Borda,
Borda Elimination,
Minmax,
Nanson,
Ranked Pairs,
Condorcet (SPI),
Condorcet (Debian):

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Luk Claes
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin Zobel-Helas
• Joerg Jaspert

Bucklin:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Luk Claes
• Joerg Jaspert
• Ian Jackson

IRV,
Pluralty:

• Bdale Garbee
• David Graham
• Joshua D. Drake
• Martin 'Joey' Schulze
• Luk Claes
• MJ Ray

Most of these seem to come out in favour of the result we achieved with Condorcet. Plurality (aka: First past the post) and IRV put heavy emphisis on the voters first choice. It doesn't really make sense to compare results from a condorcet ballot with either of these methods. Bucklin is rather meaningless in a multi-winner election.

In answer to "is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views", it's possible, but unlikely. IRV and Pluralty are the ones to go for if you want the majority of people unhappy, unlike the others, which produce the majority of people happy.

MJ Ray writes:

There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn’t tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what?

This displays such an antipathy against secret ballots (which protect voters from social pressure, not to mention coercion of various degrees of severity) that I now consider MJ Ray an unacceptable candidate in any future election where I am enfranchised. By the way, since the election MJ Ray discusses had no None Of The Above option, there is no way to determine if his low rankings were due to dislike or just that there were better candidates. Added later on the same day:
MJR has responded to this post; his response is linked and reproduced in the comments section. MJR seems to have missed the subtle hint that his cowardice statement is a form of social pressure itself. In fact, he continues and elevates the pressure in his response, implying that if one is afraid of him, one should not vote (presumably, at least not ranking him low). That these statements are given after the vote has closed is a mitigating factor, but it does not absolve him, as the statements are applicable to any future elections where he is a candidate. I m now even more convinced that MJR belongs in the bottom of any ranked vote from me.

I wasn't elected to SPI's board. I didn't think I would be once I saw all the other candidates (I nominated before all declared), but it looks like I would have been elected with those votes under some other common systems. I think both first-past-the-post and alternative vote (also known as instant run-off voting, reportedly recommended by Robert's Rules for election-by-mail) would have resulted in this same board:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Joshua D. Drake
4. Martin 'Joey' Schulze
5. Luk Claes
6. MJ Ray

Instead, the results were:

1. Bdale Garbee
2. David Graham
3. Luk Claes
4. Joshua D. Drake
5. Joerg Jaspert
6. Martin Zobel-Helas

Nevertheless, well done to the new members. On one hand, I'm happier, because there's still two of my top four there and now I've less required work. On the other hand, I would have liked a crack at it myself and both boards are disappointing because there's no Ian Jackson. An interesting thing is how many times I appear in each position in voting lists: (5, 1, 2, 1, 9, 6, 6, 3, 3, 4, 2, 9, 37), or as a bar chart:

1. st
2. nd
3. rd
4. th
5. th
6. th
7. th
8. th
9. th
10. th
11. th
12. th
13. th

A fairly acceptable middle-of-road candidate for most of it, but then a huge spike at the low end. Note that a majority of voters put me in positions 11-13. There wasn't much warning of that one coming during hustings. WTF? There seem to be some 30 or 40 voters who really dislike me, but didn't tell me that straight, preferring to be silent then vote me down. Are you cowards, or what? More generally, is this type of Condorcet ever likely to elect someone who polarises views, or who many inexplicably dislike? What does this say for any plan to use a Condorcet for debian's social committee? Could majorities always prevent minority reps? Update: Neil McGovern posted a few comparisons of more complex systems (I only did the easy ones) and AJ posted STV results which completes the main systems, I think. It seems Condorcet-SPI wasn't as unusual as I first thought. Finally, as I understand it, turn-out was 25% of voting members (not the 25% of SPI members that some press reported). Why was turn-out so low? (2007-08-08: 1 pingback, 3 comments)

I've been offline, but I think I've caught up now. Email if you think I missed you. Here's some of what I did before I went offline:

robmyers Seller's Remorse

Social Contract ten years on July 5 -- celebration?

Advertising Free Software Projects etbe

A Cambridge Co-operator: Great News

Michael

Cooperative? My Arse Web design and development techniques by Steve Tucker

Anti-DRM campaign, Apple Store, London.

Place Your Blog on a 'Busy Intersection'

Should Links from Your Blog Open in a New Window? Reader Opinions

Back

Co-opNet :: View topic - What Crisis

LWN: Totally "free" Ubuntu? That's the plan for Gobuntu (Linux.com)

The Problem with RSS

Property of a Lady Answers to Love Is Strange Trivia

Fairtrade Beer niq's soapbox

Co-opNet :: View topic - The Cooperative Tour de France

ITV response to Coverage Question... - Page 3 - ITV Message Boards

Why doesn't Online Main Stream Media link?

Property of a Lady Tuesday Trivia: Dance

Humor for Bond 22? Ultimate James Bond Fan Blog

lamby :: blog :: Graduation

itv and Other Tours Coverage: Vuelta, ToB

Holidays-London-and-rain

Reflowd - Recentlog

Reflowd - Source code

Aaargh! niq's soapbox

I'm standing in the SPI elections on a very clear platform including cooperative values and principles and reviewing SPI against the good practice standards (last done in June 2005) so please go vote for me if you're an SPI voting member. Voting closes Saturday. The last turnout I saw was a disappointing 15%.

I've voted in favour of the Debian Maintainers GR because, despite flaws like micro-managing the initial situation [Sven Mueller], I believe it is a useful step towards reforming the New Maintainer process. Those of you with long memories may recall that I think NM should be a modern portfolio-based qualification [-project, April 2006, but probably not the first time I explained it] instead of the current, inconsistent AM-dependent one which sees good people applying too early and sometimes being turned away, sometimes being accepted too quickly, but most often sitting in DAMnation. Despite some claims to be interested in fixing NM [Raphael Hertzog], it seems the current NM team requires throwing more people at the buggy system [Raphael Hertzog] before even considering fixing the damn bugs. Of course, I suspect any suggestion would be met with a claim that NM then wasn't performing too badly, now that it had more people. I think that's damage, so I hope the DM GR can be a first stepping stone in a new path to becoming a DD which routes around the damage.

OK, this is probably my last Tour post for a while... back to business, software and the village after this, but I heard this on the radio over breakfast and I can't see much about it online. One of the most disappointing things for English Tour fans about Moreni's failed dope test [tdfblog] is the departure of his Cofidis team-mate Bradley Wiggins from the race, days before the last (and most Wiggins-winnable) of the individual time trials. In an interview this morning on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme at about 07:45 (in case you can Listen Again to it), there was the question:

"We've had whole teams withdrawing. It's not just the two who test positive. It's the sense that those are the tip of an iceberg, isn't it? The whole team pulls out and you don't really know how many others in that team are affected by the same behaviour."

and UCI president Pat McQuaid answered:

"Well, I mean, the fact that the whole team pulled out is something which the UCI is quite annoyed about, in actual fact, and it was that the organisers asked the teams to pull out. It wasn't the fact that the teams pulled out of their own accord. The organisers said to them, as a result of the positive, that they got the one person and they said they want the whole team out of it. That actually goes against the rules and it shouldn't have happened. Erm, so, from that point of view, you can't put anything on the other riders. You can't say that the other riders are up to anything just because they're not in the race. They were asked by the organisers to get out."

The interview continues to point out how there's much more testing in cycling now than ever before, and more than in any other sport (remember, Puerto implicated footballers and others too), but it's interesting how the whole-team-out approach is criticised for removing the other riders on a team from the race testing! Anyway, by the UCI president's reasoning, Bradley Wiggins should still be racing. Well done to UCI and the tour for catching Moreni and almost-well-done to Moreni for admitting it, but boo Cofidis for pulling the whole team out! (2007-07-26: +1 comment)

After my comments about the TV audience figures, Ismael Valladolid Torres commented:

"Audience in Spain will keep on raising while Contador keeps playing such a big race!"

I hope that's still the case after the recent revelations. The evidence suggests that Vinokourov had someone else's blood [tdfblog] and Cofidis's Moreni was using something like a nutsack patch [tdfblog] while Rabobank have fired race leader Rasmussen for telling them he was in Mexico when he was in Italty [tdfblog] so it looks like this year's race is still really unpredictable as the dopes are caught and kicked out. Maybe my hopes for a Valverde (now 6th, 10:18 back) win still stand a chance... (My "serious" prediction, Kl den, left with Vino.)

Peter Brown replied:

"Thanks for the message. Here are some comments on the issues you raise:

"> - On the Radio New Internationalist show "Up in Smoke", during an interview with Peter Brown of FSF (about 43 minutes in), I was surprised to hear the following revelation that FSF uses Skype and the failure to challenge the claim that Skype is free software:"

The FSF doesn't use Skype. I would appreciate if you would clarify that on your blog post. The interviewer used Skype to telephone me on an FSF telephone. I agree that from what I said, it would be easy to infer that FSF uses Skype, but it doesn't. The interview lasted about an hour and we covered a lot of ground. Also, in this exchange I didn't clarify for the listener that when the interviewer remarked that "Skype was free", they meant as in price, but not as in freedom.

"> - I was disappointed not to find much on the FSF web site about the need for free VoIP software, building on GNU oSIP and other free software, instead of Skype's proprietary software, which has contained spyware and worms already. Will you be adding such information soon? What is the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems?"

Skype is proprietary and we don't use it. In that section of the interview we were discussing telecoms monopoly and net neutrality, and I lost the focus on the free software issue - my bad. As far as adding an article about VOIP on fsf.org I think that's a great idea. Unfortunately, I don't think we can cover that immediately, as we have some campaigns we have other campaign activities to focus on. We would be glad to take a contribution though, if you would like to write such an article - we might also want to think about using such an article as a basis for a campaign.

"> - Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality and the privacy problems of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short interview."

Thanks. I actually used to work at the New Internationalist in Oxford, and they are a great coop. I have been working with them now for a couple of years, tying to encourage them to cover free software related issues for their audience. Have you seen the article Bruce Byfield (Newsforge) wrote that I got placed in the November issue of the magazine? all the best peter"

Thanks for the reply! To my shame, I'd completely forgotten that Skype can also call ordinary telephones and the interview didn't remind me. I guess that might be because my main awareness of Skype is when it's a problem, when someone gives a skype: address instead of a sip: one or a real phone number. However, I'm not sure a called person would usually say that they were being called over Skype, rather than being telephoned. FSF people are smarties, though, so can hear the artefacts, or maybe the interviewer had mentioned it beforehand. Anyone else want to summarise the benefits of free software VoIP compared to Skype systems? I won't get time before next month. kris commented:

"There's openwengo, it has more features than skype (i.e. video), is encrypted, open and free. Enjoy."

I keep meaning to try openwengo, but each time I look at it, I fail to find the source tarball for the latest release. It also seems to be Qt-only, which I also try to avoid installing (as it'd be a fourth set of desktop widgets). At the moment, I'm using linphone from the command-line. I sometimes consider replacing it with a stand-alone telephone adapter. I wonder: are any running free software? (2007-07-27: 7 comments)

Preface to the last post: I'm aware that my surprise at FSF using Skype does raise the old question "where do you draw the line?" - For example, do you refuse to use the fixed-line telephone system if your exchanges are not running free software? Me, I use the telephone system because it's effectively a monopoly and we don't have an alternative that works for me. I sometimes try to nibble at the system with the Phone Co-op and more VoIP use, but it's no fun banging my head against a wall. However, I boycott Skype because I can't tell what it's doing, there have been enough bad reports that I don't trust it and the alternatives of SIP and IAX work for me, but I expected FSF not to use Skype for idealistic reasons. FSF leaders like RMS have promoted things like Why schools should exclusively use free software [by Richard Stallman], carefully corrected inaccurate claims about free software and refused to mention some proprietary software products. They were often criticised for it, but they continued to do it (for good reasons IMO, even when I disagreed with them). So, FSF's Controller giving an interview over Skype seemed a rather surprising about-face. Then the interviewer claimed "Skype is free" and it went unchallenged. After the show, I sent the email...

I just sent this: Dear FSF, On the Radio New Internationalist show "Up in Smoke", during an interview with Peter Brown of FSF (about 43 minutes in), I was surprised to hear the following revelation that FSF uses Skype and the failure to challenge the claim that Skype is free software:

"Peter Brown: ... This interview today is being transmitted through Skype. We're talking through Skype. Now, that obviously is a direct threat to the entrenched telecoms and they would like to restrict that, to lower the quality of the voice connection and they want to do that with lots of other types of transmission. Rachel Maher: And can they do that? Because Skype of course is free and there's a really direct benefit for organisations like ours, which is a non-profit organisation using Skype technology. Will they be able to do that? Peter Brown: Yes, so what they can do is easily identify types of information being passed, so what they can typically do is downgrade the service that you're using, so that - for instance, voice communication - those packets of data can be slowed down, effectively making voice communciation more difficult. Now this can only really be achieved if they're able to manipulate legislation. Unfortunately, they have a long history of being very successful at this. I mentioned earlier on that Digital Restrictions Management are a threat to our freedoms because it's allowing them to erect gateways and to control what it is that we can view and do with our computers. ..."

I was disappointed not to find much on the FSF web site about the need for free VoIP software, building on GNU oSIP and other free software, instead of Skype's proprietary software, which has contained spyware and worms already. Will you be adding such information soon? What is the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems? Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality and the privacy problems of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short interview. Regards, MJR

Although a small puddle formed uphill of our house, it soon soaked away, so I thought we'd got away without any problems from the unexpected Summer Rain [niq's soapbox] around here, but it seems I was wrong... Walking along Kewstoke Road yesterday, I was surprised to see sandbags outside one house. When I mentioned it in the greengrocer's, Nicky (excuse any misspelling) said they'd been sweeping the water flowing down the hill away from the shop door, as it would kill the wood floor and the electrics beneath if they didn't. It seems the other side of the hill also had some flash floods, reported in The Weston Mercury - News: The day the rains came down. Even so, it was much less than up-river in Gloucestershire and across in Oxfordshire, where Midcounties Co-op has mobilised its resources to combat flood chaos [coop news] by distributing essentials like water. It seems finding out whether you're in a flood risk area is unnecessarily difficult because the Environment Agency gives its reasons for stopping flood data being used [Free Our Data] - in short, they want to sell us our data a second time! In the longer term, it looks like things may change drastically around here if an entrepreneur from Burnham-on-Sea succeeds in his plan to wall in Weston-super-Mare with Severn Lake. (tip WWN ) What would that do to floods?

Bloomberg: Tour de France TV Audiences Rise in Europe Even After Scandals (tip tdfblog ) reports audiences are up 6% in France, 11% in Spain and 40% in Denmark (to over 800,000). Italy's RAI reports 1.2million viewers, while ARD/ZDF averaged 1.4million until they pulled the plug over half a dope test. In the UK, the BARB Weekly Summaries show the tour's London-Canterbury Stage 1 charting with 178,000 viewers on itv4. That's up from 143,000 for 2006's stage 1 (up 24%). Last year's itv4 coverage seems to have peaked at 197,000, so it'll be interesting to see how later stages fare, as details are announced. Stage 1 was also shown on the more widely available (analogue+digital) itv1 channel. The itv1 coverage didn't chart, so it must have had less than 3.41 million viewers, but I can't see exactly how many. British Eurosport's reported audience for Stage 1 increased from 84,000 last year to 118,000 (up 40%). Their 2006 peak was 100,000 for the last Thursday highlights, so that's already broken. They've been advertising pretty widely, with really annoying Franglais adverts that mispronounce the race name ("Tardy France" eh?). There was also an overspill into other channels, which we don't usually see. Two of my favourites: Graham Jones: What do the Tour de France and a Victoria sponge have in common with your social networking web site? Channel 4: Tour de France's UK appeal (video feed) mms://a1167.v15478c.c15478.g.vm.akamaistream.net/7/1167/15478/v0004/origin.channel4.com/news/2007/07/05_bike.wmv

Both local papers are reporting that the council's investigations found nothing wrong but there's still nothing on North Somerset Council's web site. WWN: Reports that recyclable waste is being dumped in landfill sites have been rubbished by the council. The Weston Mercury - News: Recycling gets clean bill of health

Recently, online mapping seems to be going through a period of "if it isn't broken yet, keep adding features until it is." I'm looking for a UK mapping web site which must include contour data (useful for bicycles), be usable without JavaScript and cookies (useful for mobile browsing) and be easy to write a search form for (useful for web links and bookmarklets); and should include aerial photos, postcode search and other countries. I used to use Multimap but it recently started requiring JavaScript and ditched the OS maps which showed the contours. Streetmap is still usable, but the visible copy of the beta site makes it look like they're about to make the same JavaScript-hungry mistake (emailed). Google Maps works without JavaScript and cookies (despite its whinging on the front page) but doesn't have contour data. And it's Google, who I don't like for other reasons. OpenStreetMap, Maporama, Mapblast and Ordnance Survey all seem to require JavaScript (OS despite their own accessibility policy - emailed). Map24 just seems broken in ways I've not debugged. So, besides Streetmap for now, is there an easy-to-use UK web map with contours?

Google seems to be having a harder time with adverts in 2007. Firstly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission alleges misleading and deceptive conduct by Trading Post and Google. Then, a report suggests Click Fraud Up to 15.8% in Second Quarter. Now, it looks like Opera may be about to break Google adverts from many mobile devices - Harishankar asked:

"Does this blog post [Mobile Phones and Mobile Games: Google's difficulty in over-coming Opera mini's Proxy Server] saying "opera mini 4 is bringing difficuilties to google adsense" make sense?"

I'm surprised Opera's proxies are so privacy-friendly, but it makes sense to me. I expect Google will change their adsense policies yet again soon, if this worries their clients and they don't want a showdown with Opera.

The first compile run is almost finished; for now, it's only binutils but you can see the general direction here.

For part of Stage 11, I watched the new Tour live coverage on Sat.1 who bought the German rights. When Sat.1 is busy, Pro7 will cover it. The two stations are owned by the same company, along with Kabel1, N24 and 9Live. The coverage was OK - the same French pictures as everyone else, but fewer extra features than ARD/ZDF. Commentary was a bit pedestrian, but that's like ZDF. I like Eurosport's commentary much more. International Herald Tribune reports that Eurosport's ratings tripled for stage 10 which is unsurprising. Eurosport and Sat.1 both seem to be on the same ~30% of German DVB-T as well as DVB-S. In comments on my last post about this, Thomas asked:

"You don't read German papers, do you?"

No. I've not even tried to buy one since moving to this village.

"I do, and I'm neither outraged nor surprised. It is a fairly logical step in light of the debate and the public reception of the tour, cycling pros, and Team T-Mobile in particular."

Is it public reception? Around 50% of those polled by ZDF disagreed with the decision (according to the IHT link above). Given all the ZDF spin on this, that's shockingly low. Is this driven by the silly debate of Bundestag members, rather than public opinion? (I've still not forgiven them for booting Eurosport off of ZDFvision. CDU seem to like messing ARD/ZDF about.) Are German papers in a feeding frenzy? In some days, they'll move onto football or boxing or something else. Get this in context: it's not like the old scandals where we had pro teams or wives being caught with car boots full of drug kits.

"I'd also bet that T-Mobile will quit as a sponsor."

It didn't seem like that from TV interviews, but I guess they wouldn't say yet. I think if they were going to jump ship, they would have done it after last year's worse problems. AIUI, their contract expires 2010 anyway and I wonder whether all the good publicity from their tour outing in England will help them stay until then.

"Some things belong in pharmacology textbooks and not on TV screens."

Does this mean drugs or incomplete drug tests? ;-)

"If I paid German TV fees, I'd be outraged that this comes that late. But then, I know better and don't have a TV in the first place."

Oh, well! Then I guess nothing would convince you to watch the tour! Philipp Kern commented:

"they did not threaten for a year actually. After the big doping scandal some months ago they explicitly announced that they will drop the Tour de France if a new doping case pops up. Granted, the person in question did dope before the Tour."

We don't know that yet - only one sample has been tested so far and even then, this test is controversial and has been successfully appealed against before. It's only a case. Also, maybe it wasn't the TdF, but here's a comment about ARD in 2006 threatening to drop cycling (scroll to 25.10.).

"The argumentation is that the Tour should not be a contest of the best doping substances like it could have been the last years. But I am probably biased because I don't watch the Tour, or sports in general."

No more biased than ARD/ZDF's producers, it seems. In an interview on itv4, a ZDF producer said they would drop any sporting event with a doping problem like cycling. So, if ZDF have dropped cycling for 1 in 189 participants being accused of doping, then if any footballer is accused of drugs offences, they cannot show any matches involving them. If you want to take football off ZDF, you know what to do... Thijs Kinkhorst reports in "Too much testosterone" that NOS also continues coverage, like our itv. Good on them. Let's applaud any drug cheats getting caught and punished, after we're reasonably sure.

Daniel Martin commented:

"Often, dustups like these are the result of upstream not caring about one or more of the following: 1) Licenses. Many people will release code with no license attached to it at all, which means (Thanks to the wonders of the Berne convention) that no one else can distribute it. 2) Patent restrictions (the gif patent issue is now dead, but there's still patents on some other graphic formats) 3) Restrictions against selling the software for commercial gain, using the software in the military, in biotech, etc. The netpbm copyright file seems to include instances of each of these. I don't know how it escalated into being unable to build based on upstream."

Thanks for the info. I'm still surprised debian doesn't keep a (maybe big) patchset rather than a fork on this one. I don't remember what put me off it, but maybe imagemagick isn't so bad...

Marc 'Zugschlus' Haber:

"I think I'm going to stop being responsive to users. They're not worth the blood pressure."

Andrew Suffield:

"But realistically, all that is fairly minor compared to the number of idiot users, idiot developers, kooks, luddites, zealots, managers, politicians, and self-obsessed fools that everybody has to deal with in the free software world."

I think I have a new source of blunt put-downs.