Vote: Sage Code of Conduct

[David Roe]

Dear Sage developers,

Thank you for those you nominated people for the committee following my request, and thank you for those of you willing to serve.  The nominees are

Nils Braun (nbr...@sfu.ca)

J-P Labbé (jeanphil...@gmail.com, jplab on github)

John Palmieri (jhpalm...@gmail.com, jhpalmieri on github)

Viviane Pons (vivia...@gmail.com, VivianePons on github)

David Roe (roed...@gmail.com, roed314 on github)

Julian Rüth (julian...@fsfe.org, saraedum on github)

William Stein (wst...@gmail.com, williamstein on github)

Yuan Zhou (xiaoy...@gmail.com, yuan-zhou on github)

Please send votes to sage-c...@googlegroups.com* by Thursday, March 14.  We are using approval voting, so you can vote for as many candidates as you like.  The committee will include at least the top 5 candidates, and will be enlarged to include all tied candidates if there is a tie for 5th place.  Note that you can choose to vote for more or less than 5 candidates if you like.

Discussion of candidates is allowed (feel free to continue this thread), but please be respectful.  If you want to see the participation of these candidates in the Sage community, you can search by name on sage-devel and on github.

Thanks for voting,

David

for the Sage Code of Conduct Committee

* We are replacing sage-...@googlegroups.com with sage-c...@googlegroups.com; they currently have the same membership.

[Martin R]

For some reason, I cannot see the name of the newsgroup I should be sending my vote to.  (I am using the google groups webinterface)

Martin

[John H Palmieri]

Martin: it's "sage-conduct" at googlegroups.com.

[Martin R]

Thank you - apparently, I do not have permission to see that group.  I'll try to send my vote by email.

[John H Palmieri]

Right, please email your vote to that group. Only members of the committee can actually see the postings.

[John H Palmieri]

Dear all,

Voting continues until Thursday. We have been acknowledging each vote as it comes in, so if you think you voted but have not received an acknowledgment, please email sage-conduct at googlegroups.com.

Regards,

  John

[Dima Pasechnik]

On Thursday, March 7, 2024 at 6:13:42 PM UTC David Roe wrote:

Dear Sage developers,

Thank you for those you nominated people for the committee following my request, and thank you for those of you willing to serve.  The nominees are

Nils Braun (nbr...@sfu.ca)

Braun? Or Bruin ?

I didn't notice when I voted (noticed only last night), as I blindly assumed it's Bruin,

and just went and searched for Nils Braun at SFU, (nobody found)

but that's too big a typo to let this unnoticed.

It can very well be that someone looked at Nils Braun (<nbr.....@sfu.ca>)

and was unable to figure out who this is - and just skipped.

Note that Nils Bruin has a github handle: https://github.com/nbruin

but it was not listed.

I think the vote shoud be re-done - if it's indeed not a mystical Nils Braun

on the ballot, and not Nils Bruin

Cheers,

Dima

[John H Palmieri]

Dear all,

First, in response to Dima's post: yes, it should definitely be Nils Bruin on the ballot. My sincere apologies to Nils that we got his name wrong! If anyone would like to adjust their ballot in light of this, please let us know and we will make any corrections you request.

Second, voting closes tomorrow. Please vote!

Regards,

  John

[David Roe]

Hi all,

With 18 people voting there was a relevant tie.  The new committee is

Nils Bruin (nbr...@sfu.ca, nbruin on github) - sorry again for the earlier misspelling!

J-P Labbé (jeanphil...@gmail.com, jplab on github)
John Palmieri (jhpalm...@gmail.com, jhpalmieri on github)
Viviane Pons (vivia...@gmail.com, VivianePons on github)
David Roe (roed...@gmail.com, roed314 on github)
Julian Rüth (julian...@fsfe.org, saraedum on github)

Thank you to everyone for voting!

I also want to thank Vincent Delecroix, David Joyner, Harald Schilly, and William Stein for their service on the committee up until this year.

David

[Kwankyu Lee]

Congratulations!!!

[kcrisman]

I also want to thank Vincent Delecroix, David Joyner, Harald Schilly, and William Stein for their service on the committee up until this year.

 

Amen! 

[Dima Pasechnik]

It's very important to note that with multiwinner approval voting, merely counting the votes per candidate and picking the top ones can lead to rather unfair results

(unlike in the single winner case).

For instance, if we elect k=3 candidates out of 6, say, $a,b,c,d,e,f$, and out of N=19 people, 10 vote for $a,b,c$, and 9 - for $d,e,f$, then, with approval voting, $a,b,c$ get elected (as $a,b,c$, get 10 votes each, more than $d,e,f$), and almost half the voters, 9 out of 10, get no representation of their views. 

This is obviously bad - in such a case a fair outcome would be something like $a,b,d$. Here "fair" has to be quantified, of course.

I've posted some details (and pointed at some solutions) on this here:

https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/37501#issuecomment-2004121053

It would be interesting to get the anonymised returned ballots and see if we did well on this occasion.

As well, adjustments ought to be made along the lines outlined above.

Dima

[David Roe]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2024 at 11:10 AM Dima Pasechnik <dim...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's very important to note that with multiwinner approval voting, merely counting the votes per candidate and picking the top ones can lead to rather unfair results

(unlike in the single winner case).

For instance, if we elect k=3 candidates out of 6, say, $a,b,c,d,e,f$, and out of N=19 people, 10 vote for $a,b,c$, and 9 - for $d,e,f$, then, with approval voting, $a,b,c$ get elected (as $a,b,c$, get 10 votes each, more than $d,e,f$), and almost half the voters, 9 out of 10, get no representation of their views. 

This is obviously bad - in such a case a fair outcome would be something like $a,b,d$. Here "fair" has to be quantified, of course.

I've posted some details (and pointed at some solutions) on this here:

https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/37501#issuecomment-2004121053

It would be interesting to get the anonymised returned ballots and see if we did well on this occasion.

As well, adjustments ought to be made along the lines outlined above.

The committee has agreed to release anonymized voting records, since the benefit gained for picking a better system for future votes outweighs the privacy risk (we've anonymized both voters and candidates).  As I explained here, if we had stuck with 5 people on the committee then different system would have had different results, but after extending to 6 based on the approval-voting tie there was broad agreement: Approval Voting, Proportional Approval Voting, Phragmén's sequential rule, Maximin Support and Equal Shares all selected the current committee; only Minimax approval voting had a different result.

The anonymized votes are here, in case anyone wants to do further analysis.

David

[kcrisman]

The anonymized votes are here, in case anyone wants to do further analysis.

Thanks, David.  This actually confirms that, as such elections go, it's remarkably non-controversial; a third (!) of the electorate approved everybody, and only one candidate got less than 2/3 (approval) votes.  And nearly everyone used more than half their potential votes.  There is a small C/D vs. E/F(/G, and certainly not uniformly anyway) bloc difference in a third of the voters, but that's not spectacular at all.  (If you would like actual harmonic analysis of more subtle potential coalitions, it will, alas, have to wait until well after the end of the semester - and anything else would probably be well within tolerations of randomness on a suitable probability distribution.)

[Gonzalo Tornaría]

Thanks David,

It would be interesting to add nominations that were banned into the analysis. For all we know, somebody could have received 16/17 votes if they were in the ballot, but a single negative vote was enough to prevent that.

Could you add anonymized information about nominations that didn't make it into the ballot, and about the vetos that you received?

Best,

Gonzalo

On Wednesday, March 20, 2024 at 1:58:48 PM UTC-3 David Roe wrote: