Welcome to new Board members

[Outgoing NAN Team]

Thanks once again to those who volunteered to take over administration
of the Big-8 group list. We have tabulated the votes amongst the
volunteers, and the following people will form the Preliminary
Board, in random order:

Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com>
BarB <pat...@earthlink.net>
Dave Sill <MaxFr...@sws5.ornl.gov>
"Martin X. Moleski, SJ" <mol...@canisius.edu>
Brian Edmonds <br...@gweep.ca>
tski...@killfile.org (Tim Skirvin)
ru.ig...@usask.ca
Yves Bellefeuille <y...@storm.ca>
James Farrar <james.s...@gmail.com>
j...@kamens.brookline.ma.us (Jonathan Kamens)
Thomas Lee <t...@psp.co.uk>

We will be creating a mailing list for these people to use while
they discuss what they want to do with the Big8.

For the public: I hope you join me in welcoming and thanking these
people for their willingness to administrate the Big8. Once the
new volunteers have determined their course of action, they will
be letting you know how to proceed on any group proposals you might
have.

For those who are interested in the details of the voting:

I followed a STV voting scheme as discussed here:
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_Single_Transferable_Votes>. In
particular, I used the Senatorial rules for reallocation of initial
surplus, and the naive skipping method for subsequent surplus. The
latter was described as typical, and little wonder, because fully
applying the Senatorial approach there would be rather complicated
(and recursive).

At any rate, we had 22 ballots. There were initially 24 volunteers,
but 3 explicitly withdrew, and one never responded to the call for
votes. That left 20 volunteer ballots, and 2 ballots by Russ and
myself. All 22 ballots were treated identically. Since the number
of seats to fill was indeterminate, I first tried a "quota" of 3
votes. This yielded 7 board members. This was deemed too few, and
so I tried a quota of 2 votes. This yielded 11 board members,
including all 7 from the previous attempt. This was in the range
of board members I considered reasonable, and so the STV scheme
(namely 22 divided by 2) decided the final number.

I will not be discussing the order of finish further, except with
Russ. I might also be willing to redo this procedure on the same
ballots in the event that the preliminary Board itself requests it,
to account for attrition or something of that nature. One elegant
thing about the ballot method is that ineligible candidates can
simply be removed from people's lists, resulting in newly valid
lists. This is how I handed the 3 volunteers who withdrew.

For those interested in the minutia of this voting scheme -- and I
found it fairly interested myself -- the 9th elected Board member
won with the sum of 1 full vote, 1 half vote, 2 one-ninth votes,
and finally a 5/17th vote. This yielded a 5/306th overage, which
I dutifully redistributed proportionately to the remaining candidates.
Lucky for me, the determination of the first 8 elected candidates
went very simply. Determining 10th and 11th place was much more
involved, which is another good indication that that's a reasonable
spot to deem the Board filled. Anyway, I found it an interesting
exercise, and I'd like to see this sort of voting appear in more
elections out in physical politics. It would certainly make me
feel more engaged as a voter; I have not experienced it as a voter
myself.

Todd McComb for Outgoing NAN Team