MGRC Diversity

Besides, this helios reference code considers the voting type to be “Approval” and enables its max factor to be set to any number including 5.

That should settle it: election didn’t go according to plan.

No intent needs to be prescribed, unless we fail to fix it (and, worse, rub it in!)

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You are completely right, I answered my own question in the post. It seems not only timezone confuse me but also month of the year… sorry mate.

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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.

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With only 5 votes, maximum, each vote becomes more valuable to each voter. They are more likely to assign them carefully.

Obviously each vote is less valuable when there are 19 vs 5, all else equal.

With as many picks as one wants, voter may be less likely to discern between candidates and succumb to preconceived biases (Zooko said campaign extended for months, some people wished to vote after spending hours reading, voters may have felt rushed, etc)

The real question is,

Why didn’t we follow the intended voting mechanism? This is a failure of governance. Are we going to turn a blind eye to this for the sake of political expediency?

Human-error, bias. I’ll fix it for transparency and accountability!

Very sharp distinction between well-connected/pre-funded candidates and newcomers that deserve a fairer shot.

With immediate and relentless push to extend term limits despite self-inflicted governance failure, I would not be surprised if this is all theater to ensure a well-timed red carpet is rolled out for a hidden product roadmap (Numerai Treasury Management? Balancer zUSD?)

(Which is fine, I guess. Disheartening for decentralization. If no one else wants to ring the alarm, I won’t! Some talked about impeaching committee members during candidate calls! Bring that same energy!)

3 posts were merged into a new topic: Voting Mechanisms

… out of the pool of candidates.

The pool of candidates = N.

The prescription is quite clear. We deviated from what was prescribed and without any reasoning or public discussion as to why.

Whether its incompetence or foul play, we should not be willing to change the voting mechanism without due process.

We should not accept the results of an experiment if it was not conducted appropriately, and we should not use those results as the initial conditions from which to extend and entrench decision-making for years.

So, the voting mechanism was clearly changed yet we are to assume it was done so accidentally? Why did it change?

If there is a reason for the change, reference it.
If there isn’t, we failed the protocol.

AFAIK, the change happened behind-the-scenes. Ring the alarm.

@moderator, please keep my replies in MGRC Diversity thread as I am concerned the voting mechanism was co-opted to favor insiders

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Discussion about approval voting with unrestricted votes

I agree the Diversity thread has been overtaken by the voting mechanism/methods. I will move these to the more recent thread so this one can get back to “Diversity”

@jmsjsph please feel free to continue the conversation in the other thread.

All, please post discussion about this elections “Voting Mechanics” in this thread:

To keep this thread on topic.

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This is obviously a complex topic. I think there are several things at play here:

  1. There is one set of voters
  2. All candidates were being selected at once
  3. Little diversity overall in open source projects, cryptocurrencies, etc. :cry:
  4. Systemic biases in voting :cry:

That’s like asking for a full popular vote in the US for all representatives. Instead of some representatives being more similar to the district they live in, you would instead have representatives that are more “average” across the board.

Some ways to encourage diversity may be the following:

  1. Try to divide the MGRC into voting groups. Say miners are considered important enough to select one board member, ZEC holders another board member, etc. This is super difficult to do in practice. In most public elections, we do this roughly by population, though of course humans mess with gerrymandering. No matter how this is done, it’s sadly bound to be political. Asking, say, the Zcash Foundation to “gerrymander” the voting blocks could be problematic, even if they have the best intentions.
  2. Vote board positions in stages. It makes sense that the initial board needed to be elected at once. However, it’s easier to get a good picture of what the diversity of the board will look like if we vote for one person at a time. If voters see all of the other members are similar, they can prioritize voting for more diverse candidates. Voters selecting many options at once don’t really have a good understanding of what the actual diversity will look like before it’s too late. While in theory it would be possible for the voters to all select candidates a certain way, it’s easier to notice shortcomings in practice when voting for fewer candidates at a time.

I think the simplest thing to do is to vote for fewer candidates at the same time, though that alone doesn’t address the entire issue. Drastic other changes may be a good idea but they should be considered carefully.

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Chiming in with my 2 zats as a voter, in case the feedback is useful for future iterations: I like the voting method used (approval voting) and am happy with the vote result. I myself made it a point to tailor my own voting selections to the best cross-section of “skills/experience/diversity” and picked all candidates that I felt were at the top of those criteria. When it came to the diversity category, I simply made sure not to weight my ballot too heavily toward any one gender/nationality/ethnicity/professional background.

Although the final vote result doesn’t reflect my ballot perfectly, many of the winners were those I voted for, and overall I’m happy with the results. I think this MGRC will be a great group to bootstrap and lead us through the first term.

To the question of how we can get more diverse outcomes in the future, that’s a tough question to answer. I think it depends not only on the voting method used but how voters themselves are voting. Are they voting with diversity in mind? Simply choosing all of the candidates they feel are most qualified without regard for diversity? Some other way? Although we can control the voting method we cannot control how voters decide to vote.

One idea I have that might not necessarily help with diversity directly (depending on how you’re defining diversity) but moreso with representation more broadly would be to have “chairs” dedicated to specific community segments on the MGRC. There could be chairs to represent different segments of the community we deem important: a “mining chair”, a “protocol dev” chair, an “app dev” chair, a “HODLer chair”, a “daily spender” chair, a “global south” chair, etc, and candidates would choose which chair to run for. Then voters could evaluate which candidates are most qualified for each chair. While this wouldn’t necessarily guarantee that we don’t end up with a mostly-white-male MGRC it would at least force voters to think about candidates categorically rather than all as one big group to select from, and would also increase the likelihood that the winners are each bringing a unique perspective to the table. (Coincidentally, I think the results of this vote kind of turned out like this anyways, which is one reason I’m happy with the results!)

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What’s the dealio with getting onto the ZCAP? I would like to join!

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I like the idea of continuing to expand ZCAP. I also think we should seriously consider adding two more seats to the MGRC next year since that could help improve diversity and representation.

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For diversity, I think adding seats to the MGRC is as bad as unrestricted approval seeking because it will drown out key strengths and valued votes in an effort to find a minority to amend and placate an existing majority

I hope next MGRC process is respectful of ZIP1014, again, but gives same 5 seats to NEW people (with NO prior financial affiliations to ECC/ZF and their VCs), selected by Sortition rather than Approval voting or Pre-Approval Voting (a.k.a. Unrestricted Approval Voting) after expanding the ZCAP by extending invites to 1. All MGRC candidates, 2. All previous grant candidates, …

Do you realise why this is a stupid idea?

If not, think about it for a while, I am sure it will come to you.

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Help a brother out … Thinking out loud here

if there is no restriction on who can apply for the mgrc, and application for the mgrc gets you on the CAP, then I can just go crazy on fiverr and rig the elections. (i probably would, so its for the best i dont get the option.)

Same logic for grant candidates

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@aristarchus if you’d like to frame a pro-expansion-to-7-argument here, I’ll do my best to argue against it.

I think I’d take the keep-it-5 position as that seems the easiest to defend, and it’s mutually exclusive with expand-to-7.

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Ahh, I did not mean to imply that the ZCAP expansion strategy is permanent. In fact, I don’t think any ZCAP expansion strategy should be permanent - any permanent strategy may be gamed. Nevertheless, I think it needs to be expanded alongside devfund expansion, for now, such that 33%, max, are insiders.

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I’m actually not strongly in favor of expanding to 7 since there are trade offs. The benefits of greater representation on the committee may not be worth the effort of voting to change the ZIP and the possibility loss of agility that comes with a larger committee.

It’s worth considering though.

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With more people, there is more inertia. We still haven’t really seen what it’s like to have a 5 person MGRC, anyway.

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