2011/2/4 mohan pradhan <pradhmohan@gmail.com>:

My point of adding country is that weightage should be given first to country and then to institute.

As Chris said, this would be a significant departure from the existing process and practise. Management and decision making with caring individuals as the unit of measure has served us very well. The recent case where an American company attempted and failed to hijack the project is a strong validation of that. There will be many more KohaCons to come and many opportunities for hosting. Having been to one and seen the really extraordinary lengths people will go to attend and the value attendees see in spreading that opportunity I'm confident that everyone will have the chance to host. Having so many genuine offers to host is very exciting. I would love to start seeing some 2012 and beyond proposals.

Further the results of the polls should be visible instantly, whenever a vote is given instead of sharing the result at the end.

I don't see the value of this. And I can imagine some serious downsides. I'd prefer people vote based on their own situation instead of factoring in my existing vote. -reed

As I explain further below, I agree with others that diversity is best achieved by rules and not by weighting voters differently based on their affiliation. Anyone promoting a particular KohaCon proposal should also advocate for that proposal. Anyone who intends to attend KohaCon 2011 should be encouraged to vote, at http://survey.web2learning.net/limesurvey/index.php?sid=15529 . If you know of any people who would attend KohaCon 2011 to learn about Koha but may not be subscribers to the Koha mailing lists, may not give great enough attention to the mailing lists, or may be otherwise unaware of the process for selecting a venue; then please inform them and encourage them to vote. The vote is open and will not end until the 17th of February (US Eastern Standard Time). Remainder of reply inline: 1. MAINTAINING DIVERSITY. 1.1. NATIONAL DIVERSITY FOR KOHACON. On Fri, February 4, 2011 10:08, mohan pradhan wrote:

Dear All,

My point of adding country is that weightage should be given first to country and then to institute. Otherwise, a big country have more vote (having more institutes) and small country will have few votes. Also there should be a system, how many votes an orgnization can give i.e. person within an organization. All these should be mentioned and there should be a system for taking into consideration these points i.e. rules for casting a vote.. This will allow to organize the conference even by a small country having support of many countries.This meets the philosophy by which the vote counting method was adopted at the beginning to give equal chance to give opportunity to all the countries of the world to organize Koha Con 2011.

I agree with what Chris Cormack and Reed Wade have written in reply that the Koha community has worked best when vesting power in individual people as distinct from organisations of which people are members. The fact that some countries are more populous than others is an issue which needs addressing for diversity but no country has a sufficiently large population to dominate the community as a whole. The fact that there may be an especially large number of people interested in hosting KohaCon in a particular country is a good reason to host KohaCon where there is the greatest interest for promoting the software. As both Chris and Reed stated, we may need to introduce rules to help maintain diversity in venues for international Koha conferences to keep KohaCon from being repeatedly held in the same populous countries. The Koha community is too small to have significant international attendance at more than one Koha conference in a year with community wide endorsement. However, local and regional conferences should be encouraged. Anyone who wants to organise a conference promoting Koha for whomever may happen to come should be encouraged. A KUDOS conference for Koha is being held in the US with presumably little expectation of attracting many people from distant countries. 1.2. ORGANISTIONAL DIVERSITY IN THE KOHA COMMUNITY. The question of voting by organisation as opposed to individuals was briefly raised at the last #koha IRC meeting but seemed to be rejected as contrary to the common understanding of how the Koha community works. There are always tensions between large and small organisations about which we will need to be continually aware. We have some diversity rules to keep any single organisation from dominating the Koha Committee of Horowhenua Library Trust, the current legal entity for the Koha project. 1.3. MULTIPLE OPTIONS FOR DIVERSITY IN KOHA SOFTWARE. Both small and large organisations benefit from the different investment which each type of organisation makes in the Koha software. Often individual large organisations have a greater ability to finance software development than small organisations but small organisations can pool resources collectively. Choice of system preferences and a commitment to not breaking features allow all interests to be served by the same software. The nature of software allows it to be designed to not exclude anyone's interests. Koha is free software which anyone may modify under the GPL to serve an individual which it may not serve already. 1.4. DIVERSITY RULES. We may need to add internationalisation and institutional size diversity rules where there are potential problems over competing interests. Good rules help the democratic process to work for everyone by protecting minorities and their interests from domination by any particular majority. Everyone has a minority interest over something which needs protecting. 2. SIMULTANEOUS POLL RESULTS.

Further the results of the polls should be visible instantly, whenever a vote is given instead of sharing the result at the end.

I favour releasing results in small blocks of votes instead of one at a time. Voting to consensus is good idea but people should not have an overly easy opportunity to merely follow a few initial votes or the last few votes without taking the time to actually evaluate the question being voted upon for themselves. Ultimately, all votes must be completely transparent because we have an open electorate and not a predefined list of registered voters. [...] Thomas Dukleth Agogme 109 E 9th Street, 3D New York, NY 10003 USA http://www.agogme.com +1 212-674-3783