On the wider point:
There is already a wealth of academic consideration to the topic of approval voting with multi-winner elections, proposing a variety scoring strategies that take into account diversity metrics and the overall approval rating of the combined committee (e.g. see https://sci-hub.se/https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-02839-7_6 for a summary survey of different approaches). I’d strongly caution against constructing an ad-hoc solution.
Every voting system has trade-offs, and moving from Simple Approval scoring to something more complex needs an actual formal analysis of the tradeoffs as they apply to the MGRC and the CAP - otherwise we risk introducing more bias (and strategic voting) into the process instead of less. (e.g. voting twice with or without a cut-off introduces a variety of strategic options for voters, some of them might increase the diversity of the committee, many of them will act against it).
On specific remedies:
I would put forward version of Net Approval scoring (coupled with the option of adding more seats to the MGRC, such that we add candidates if they would increase the overall approval of the committee) or maybe even Monroe Approval Voting (if there really is a community-wide assumption that candidates are represented by pools of voters e.g. ZF, ECC, Miners etc. then we can use MAV to ensure the committee is fairly represented). I don’t expect the discussion of what those pools should actually be to be a short or necessarily a fruitful one.
There is enough diversity of opinion in this forum that there will be strong, valid critique to practically any scoring scheme other than Simple Approval, but it is an analysis worth doing - and worth doing properly.
On CAP expansion:
Should the CAP be expanded? Absolutely, if only for the goal of decentralizing the ecosystem further. But larger voting pools are not correlated with more diverse elects (do I really need to provide citations for this?) - Diverse committees are a function of the candidate pool and the voting mechanism above all else.
On the candidate pool in this specific election:
I’ll echo @tromer and say that the current results well explained by the fact that many of the candidates were not part of the community prior to announcing their candidacy. That was certainly a consideration I made. Even with that consideration, the most-approved top 10 were diverse by almost every metric - which says something about the priorities of the community at-large.
There was also clearly a bias against pseudonymous accounts who had the disadvantage of running on a platform where they couldn’t publicly corroborate some or all of their relevant experience (that one is a much harder one to resolve going forward).
On 5/N v.s. n/N:
Regardless of the original intention of the blog posts v.s. tweets. v.s. what actually happened on Helios I’m of the opinion that n/N resulted it a more diverse approval ranking than 5/N would have.
@jmsjsph, you are going to need to provide some actual math that 5/N vs. n/N would provide a “better” outcome.
Going back to this specific election, no one candidate got more than 70% approval, and there was quite a significant difference between Shawn (69%) and Chris (56%) - zooming out further, approval ratings drop pretty quickly.
Based on the observed results it seems self-evident that 5/N voting would have likely resulted in at least 4/5 top candidates winning (I’d expect ECCs DC to have done slightly better under that model, and some turbulence among the top 5 so there is some room there).
While it is certainly a valid instantiation of approval voting to restrict the number of candidates a person can vote for, the exact number does have ramifications and they are not always going to be aligned with your stated goals - and thus they need analysis.
Specific quibbles:
@jmsjsph, I’m not sure why you’ve listed my industry as Fintech -and more so from that what you think it is that I actually do- but regardless I don’t think that’s a accurate categorization. The short code for Canada is CA, not CN (that would be China).
On to funding sources - if you are going to start stretching to second and third degree relationships (e.g. Hudson → EC → Least Authority → ECC) then I’ve got some really bad news for you about social graphs.