[Koha] Vote for Koha Con 2011

[Thomas Dukleth]

The first important thing to do for an international Koha conference is to
choose a location and dates as far in advance as possible to allow people
to have travel expenses approved as part of an annual budget process. 
Planning a year in advance is what I understand is most helpful to
librarians.

As we are behind the ideal advanced planning time, starting the voting
immediately after the last #koha meeting took precedence over considering
voting methods or ballot design carefully.  However, the choice of venue
and dates is a low value issue for the community as a whole.

The high value issue for the community as a whole is helping to ensure
good attendance by giving the maximum opportunity for advanced planning by
librarians.

Over future years, every place where there is a serious interest in Koha
will have an opportunity to host an international KohaCon.

I have continued to add information to each of the proposals on the wiki
page at http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/KohaCon2011_Proposals to help
inform voter choice.


Remainder of reply inline:


On Thu, February 3, 2011 16:40, mohan pradhan wrote:
> Dear Nicole Engard and All,
>
> Thanks for publication of official vote site for the location of Koha Con
> 2011
> and announcing the ranking system. We would appreciate if you could
> develop
> a system by which country name should also be made mandatory along with
> the
> Name of Institution.

The next time we construct a ballot we could certainly add more fields for
collecting information about who voted.

In this ballot, people can certainly add a country name or anything else
to the institution name field which may be helpful in identifying the
institution.

>.The ranking system should also be made publicly open
> just like the present system i.e. whenever a vote is given. This will make
> the voting system more
> transparent.

As long as we have no advanced voter registration process with a
verification system, voting must be publicly transparent.  Advanced
registration is an obstacle to voting which we should avoid as long as a
we can have completely open voting untainted.  The Koha community has not
yet attracted enough interest to have people playing games with votes.

>There should also be a system to give weightage system for
> counting vote.

A particular method of counting the preference votes has not been
established in advance but as I stated above the choice of venue and date
is a low value issue for the community at large relative to choosing well
in advance.  We may have the same winner no matter what preference
counting system we use.

In the Koha foundation forming vote, M J Ray analysed the votes using all
the reasonable preference voting methods.  In future, we are liable to
adopt a standard voting method for votes.

We have been discussing score (range) voting in the context of a
forthcoming vote for upgrading the Koha copyright license.  Score voting
has some difficulties over strategy which I raised,
http://lists.katipo.co.nz/pipermail/koha/2011-February/027439.html .  I am
going to post a scheme to remedy to some difficulties of score voting but
there had not been time to discuss a new voting scheme for the KohaCon
2011 vote.


> It should be country wise instead of Institution wise.

Either preference voting with a ranked ballot or score voting with
assigning scores would avoid problems where people prefer a particular
country as a venue but divide their votes between multiple candidate
venues from the same country.

However, as you are from Nepal with only one candidate venue, I suspect
that you mean something different.  What do you mean by "country wise
instead of institution wise"?

[...]

Thomas Dukleth
Agogme
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