Delegate/Community Voting

[Mikel]

If Delegates can decide, they can also bias things towards people with matching preferences. Getting a vote becomes politics, not cubing.

Did you see the suggestion from Kit in the first post's GitHub link? It's still the most reasonable one I've heard, given all the discussion in this thread.

That sounds like a good idea. The next thing to do would be to establish what the regions divisions would be.

 

[TeddyKGB]

You could let all delegates get a vote and then let delegates nominate other members of the community to also get votes which would need to be seconded by another delegate or two before they were allowed a vote.

 

[AvGalen]

Currently it is possible to have a regulation change because 1 person proposes it, nobody opposes it, so it is considered accepted. This shouldn't happen
But you also don't want to make a community poll about every little tweak.

* Polling the community should only be done once in a while (like a referendum)
* Having a decision made by one person should only be theoretically possible (like a presedential veto)

What you really want is that decisions can be made quickly by a sufficiently large and diverse group without a high barrier of entrance
Who should be allowed to make those decisions? In my opinion you would qualify if you fit one of these criteria
* If you have been a delegate at 5 competitions
* If you have been an organiser at 5 competitions
* If you have been competing during 5 years
* If you have been competing in 20 competitions
* If you have been competing in 5 countries
* (and you cannot currently be banned by the WCA, duh)

If a proposal for a regulation change gets a majority with a minimum of 10 votes from those people that sounds like a good idea to me.
And all regulation changes should be suggested and put to vote before December 1 of a year with all resulting changes applied to the regulations that would become active on January 1

 

[Lucas Garron]

Currently it is possible to have a regulation change because 1 person proposes it, nobody opposes it, so it is considered accepted. This shouldn't happen
But you also don't want to make a community poll about every little tweak.

One thing I've learned is that most competitors *don't* care about most of the Regulations.
Quite a few of these changes should simply be made when they are needed (but with public documentation).

Stuff like removing qualification rounds should come under some scrutiny by the WRC, but for most issues people just want the WRC to do the right thing in the background. I'm de facto the only one pushing changes through, and it's hard to judge when we just need a decision, and when we need to get more information about what we should be doing.

But getting more information is hard. I'm trying to post more and more about things on this forum; it's not always productive.
If we do end up with Delegate voting, we do need to figure out what is meaningful enough to go to a Delegate vote.

(I know you'd probably prefer stuff to be left out of the Regulations if it is an uncontroversial detail, but I think we need to make things work with our current system until we have something solid to replace it.)

What you really want is that decisions can be made quickly by a sufficiently large and diverse group without a high barrier of entrance

Exactly.

We somehow need to be able to get everyone's feedback for the proposal (what details/pros/cons should be in it?), and then everyone's vote. This should go as fast as possible, while still giving everyone who cares the chance to participate.

Who should be allowed to make those decisions? In my opinion you would qualify if you fit one of these criteria
* If you have been a delegate at 5 competitions
* If you have been an organiser at 5 competitions
* If you have been competing during 5 years
* If you have been competing in 20 competitions
* If you have been competing in 5 countries
* (and you cannot currently be banned by the WCA, duh)

This suffers from the kind of long arbitrary details that people criticize the Regulations for.

I'd prefer if we can figure out something more simple, similar to Kit's X% suggestions.

If a proposal for a regulation change gets a majority with a minimum of 10 votes from those people that sounds like a good idea to me.

Are you just throwing out a number, or do you really mean 10? That sounds really low to me.

And all regulation changes should be suggested and put to vote before December 1 of a year with all resulting changes applied to the regulations that would become active on January 1

I've seen a few requests that we should be responding to things during the year and making changes as needed. I don't really know what's best.

 

[kinch2002]

Kit's top percentile of people in a region ranked by competitions attended has some flaws.

The list would be far too biased against change. People not on that list will constantly be playing catch up, sometimes in an almost-impossible situation. What if I start cubing when someone else has attended 100 competitions over the last 7 years - (this is the case for many European cubers)? I don't stand a chance of catching them.

What if someone is in an area that has very few comps. I'm sure there are community members who contribute a lot and are very knowledgeable, yet cannot attend many competitions. The converse is true.

Basically I don't think that number of competitions attended is a good ranking system. I think a non-data-driven approach to choosing people is best, just like the delegate selection process.

 

[XTowncuber]

* If you have been competing in 5 countries

Out of curiosity, why this one?

 

[hcfong]

With regards to Kit's proposal, instead of using continents are regions, we could use the regional division of the WCA. That gives us 10 regions and perhaps the Board and WRC can each have a vote as well. I think the advantage of this is that the regions are smaller, giving more people the opportunity to make it into the top x-%, while still keeping the number of regions managable. I think this partly addresses Daniel's concern of people having to play catch-up, even though this remains an issue in Western Europe.

I also think that in this context, residency rather than nationality should determine which region someone represents.

 

[TMOY]

To adress the catch-up issue, a possibility could be to count, instead of the total number of comps, the number of comps attended in the past year, or in the past two or three years if one year is too short. that way, anybody would have the possibility to catch up at any time without having to attend an insanely high number of comps.

 

[Carrot]

Out of curiosity, why this one?

Different countries have different cultures/communities, so by competing in different countries you get to see how different countries/communities interprets the regulations. Obviously it is WRC's intentions that the regulations are interpreted the same worldwide, but unfortunately this is not the case.

 

[TheOneOnTheLeft]

Is it a possibility that there could be an application process to get a vote? I realise that the difficulty then becomes having a board of people who have the time to dedicate to approving or rejecting applications, and doing so in an unbiased way (so they aren't approving only those people who will side with them on the majority of issues). If we could get a fair approval system in place though, it should filter out the people who aren't particularly concerned with what the regulations are, as they won't apply. The approval criteria would probably tend towards the kind of things Arnaud suggested, but they can be assessed more subjectively, to avoid the issue Dan pointed out, and make it more possible for (relatively) new cubers to be allowed to vote without being expected to catch up with those who've been part of the community for >5 years. Just an idea, I accept that it comes with its own set of problems to be solved.

 

[AvGalen]

I was under the assumption that (delegate) voting would be for all changes, not just some.
Given how many people would qualify under my suggested rules for getting a vote I think it is reasonable to assume that if a proposal doesn't get 10 votes it wasn't worth changing it. And you don't need to get 10 votes, you need to get a majority with a minimum of 10 votes. So nobody can push through bad decisions
The percentage proposal suffers from "everyone in Africa would qualify". My proposal suffers from TLDR but could be summarised as "if you can be assumed to know your stuff".

Making changes during the year should only be necessary in the first few years of the WCA, but not anymore. What I am trying to accomplish is that everyone knows when they should check for new rules and that nobody can push a rule through at the last moment.

Thanks for explaining why I added "international experience" as a way to earn a vote. There are a few things that are different internationally and we need people that know about these things.
I think I made a decent proposal for proposal-voting, but it looks like what you really wanted was a "the WRC/me should be able to do whatever they want, but if they don't know what to do they should be able to ask their friends for advice"

 

[Laura O]

I totally agree with Daniel: the number of competitions is definitely not an indicator for the interest and knowledge of regulations.
I know competitors who bothered about regulations at their very first competition and others who didn't know if a missing edge is a DNF or not although they attended more than 20 competitions.

Apart from this criteria discussions: did anyone ever think about how these votings can be organised? I'm quite sure that the WCA does not have e-mail addresses of the competitors. It's also not sure if the delegates or the organizers keep them. Therefore it probably requires a great amount of effort to collect this data. Meanwhile it has to be kept up-to-date.

 

[AvGalen]

I am pretty sure that a simple yes/no/blanc voting form for an active list of people would be within Lucas skill to build. I don't know if github supports something like a "collect signatures approval workflow" but that would be ideal.

 

[Lucas Garron]

That gives us 10 regions and perhaps the Board and WRC can each have a vote as well.

I'm not sure what you mean. Where does the number 10 come from? (There is 1 World region, 6 continents, and a whole bunch of countries.)

I also think that in this context, residency rather than nationality should determine which region someone represents.

This might be more trouble than it's worth. If we're going by region, it might be okay to ignore the small overhead of international movement.

To adress the catch-up issue, a possibility could be to count, instead of the total number of comps, the number of comps attended in the past year, or in the past two or three years if one year is too short. that way, anybody would have the possibility to catch up at any time without having to attend an insanely high number of comps.

I think this is worth thinking about, but we need a way of picking numbers that isn't as controversial as scramble filtering.

Is it a possibility that there could be an application process to get a vote? I realise that the difficulty then becomes having a board of people who have the time to dedicate to approving or rejecting applications, and doing so in an unbiased way (so they aren't approving only those people who will side with them on the majority of issues).

Yeah, but as you mentioned it comes with its own problems. My main concern is that if we have to set up *any* sort of manual mechanism, things might slow down and get worse.
Consider the WCA website. A few people are in charge, a whole bunch of people have the authority to contribute and make things happen, but almost nothing moves. (It's a volunteer thing, so it's not anyone's blame in particular. But setting up yet another small committee doesn't magically mean what ehy were mean to do will happen.)

I was under the assumption that (delegate) voting would be for all changes, not just some.

I originally wrote a longer answer to this, but: No, not yet.

Maybe in the future, if this proves to be a good idea that everyone is comfortable with.

My proposal suffers from TLDR but could be summarised as "if you can be assumed to know your stuff".

Sort of. I wish we had a more concise way to determine people who know their stuff, then.

You seem quite focused on giving a vote to every single person who deserves one.
That's not a bad goal, but every selection criterion will have some flaws (even if your is careful to "cover its bases"). I think something simple might be better, if it's sufficiently fair, and gives us a good cross-section of people who can make good decisions about the Regulations.

To point out a particular issue with your suggestion, it also suffers from the staleness issue: Once someone qualifies for a criterion, they will never lose that status, even if they stop cubing. That can be fixed, but I don't want us to be worried about patching criteria here.
A lot of the criteria are also closely tied to going to competitions (either many competitions as a normal competitor, or fewer competitions with some specific responsibilities), so I'm not sure how distinct your criteria are from top x% for a region. I wonder if anyone could collect the data for that and tell us.

Making changes during the year should only be necessary in the first few years of the WCA, but not anymore. What I am trying to accomplish is that everyone knows when they should check for new rules and that nobody can push a rule through at the last moment.

Heh, I would love if the WRC didn't have much to do except handle some major changes in the sport.

If you're worried about pushing through rules, we can just require that proposals and adopted changes have to follow a minimum schedule. If you want it to be clear when to pay attention, we can do that leading up the new year.
(Of course, I want more people to help with this, so that we don't have a repeat of last year. Tim and Sarah are now more familiar with the WRC, and I'm sure Kit will help.)

I think I made a decent proposal for proposal-voting, but it looks like what you really wanted was a "the WRC/me should be able to do whatever they want, but if they don't know what to do they should be able to ask their friends for advice"

I'm not sure if you want me to reply with a cynical "yes" here.

This is how the Regulations used to work.
Ever since I poked Tyson and he had me start the WRC, I've been trying to make things more open. Say what you want about our GitHub repo, but at least nearly everything WRC/Regulations-related is documented now.

But I'm serious when I say that I believe that most people don't want to be making the Regulations. They just want the Regulations to have the right things, and only want direct say when they have an opinion on a (usually) controversial topic.

That changing for more people, but partly because I put a lot of effort into this subforum.

I totally agree with Daniel: the number of competitions is definitely not an indicator for the interest and knowledge of regulations.
I know competitors who bothered about regulations at their very first competition and others who didn't know if a missing edge is a DNF or not although they attended more than 20 competitions.

I think it's definitely an *indicator*. What's more, it's objective, and doesn't take any work to figure out for a competitor.

I do take your point.
At her first competition, I once asked a friend to read Article A before judging, and she was almost better than some "experienced" judges.

Apart from this criteria discussions: did anyone ever think about how these votings can be organised?

Yes. It's even listed in the GitHub issue link in the first post.

(Also, we can probably get quite a few emails from organizers. The bigger issue is setting up an account system for the WCA website, which has been very slow.)

I am pretty sure that a simple yes/no/blanc voting form for an active list of people would be within Lucas skill to build. I don't know if github supports something like a "collect signatures approval workflow" but that would be ideal.

Of course. But building it takes time, and even more work to maintain it afterwards.
Stefan has been working on a rewrite of the WCA website (which is meant to have member accounts), but even that is taking a long time. A secondary/competing system is probably not a good idea right now. Personally, I also have way too much to do.

As mentioned in the GitHub issue, a poll on the WCA forum might be practical enough (at least, for a body the size of the Delegates).
It doesn't require setting up and maintaining any new systems once people have their user accounts.

 

[Bob]

I would be in support of delegate voting. A community vote can be fine, too, but I actually do not like any of the criteria I've heard so far...and no, I don't have a criteria in mind myself.

 

[qqwref]

This is how the Regulations used to work.
Ever since I poked Tyson and he had me start the WRC, I've been trying to make things more open. Say what you want about our GitHub repo, but at least nearly everything WRC/Regulations-related is documented now.

But I'm serious when I say that I believe that most people don't want to be making the Regulations. They just want the Regulations to have the right things, and only want direct say when they have an opinion on a (usually) controversial topic.

I think what Arnaud is saying is that there seems to be a tendency to get a bunch of like-minded people together, and then use that as an excuse to push significant regulation changes through without much regard for other points of view. You have a bunch of different people on the WRC, but how many of them have competed in small European comps (or Asian or Australian or South American or...)? Or how many of them are serious enough about Megaminx to know that suddenly decreasing the acceptable tile depth by 0.5mm would have a huge impact? You may have a group of people that you personally like, but what you really need is enough diversity to get a sense of what the global community wants, rather than an echo chamber that makes a problematic idea seem to work until it doesn't.


As a side note, I'd like to point out that looking for people who approach regulation-writing in a certain way may itself be biasing the people who get chosen (and not just in terms of nationality). Remember that people from different cultures, or those who did not grow up in nerd groups, or those who are of an older generation, may think of things quite differently than you. Github is one example of this - while it may seem simple and natural to you, I assure you there are others who might as well be navigating a website written in Linear B. I'm not saying you have to change everything, just that you should realize that approaching things differently is not an indicator that someone is unfit for the committee.

 

[Erik]

...might slow down...
Heh, I would love if the WRC didn't have much to do except handle some major changes in the sport.
...Of course. But building it takes time...

Out of sincere curiousity: I notice you talk about the "danger" of things slowing down and the necessity of making quick decision and "getting stuff done". Apart from discussing and trying to repair rare big issues like the controversy after the new regulations about tile thickness, logo's, retroactive record (which were partly controversial because they were pushed through too quickly) I can hardly see the need of being lightning fast at making new versions of the regulations.

Mostly it is just working on fixing relatively small detailed wordings of which the majority can wait for next years regs, or if you like a half-year change cycle. Can you elaborate on this?

I assume that when you use a (significantly) big pool of well qualified people to make a decision, the chances of having to fix big stuff afterwards will drop anyway.

 

[hcfong]

I'm not sure what you mean. Where does the number 10 come from? (There is 1 World region, 6 continents, and a whole bunch of countries.)

I'm talking about the 10 regions which are headed by a senior delegate: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/delegates

 

[Tim Major]

I think what Arnaud is saying is that there seems to be a tendency to get a bunch of like-minded people together, and then use that as an excuse to push significant regulation changes through

I think this is pretty important. The only time changes should be made is when it is beneficial to make those changes. See Megaminx changes... beneficial? Well it makes things more consistent I guess but the cons obviously outweighed the pros (I was not personally effected, using a stickered Mega, but I think if current top 10 solvers are effected by a change it needs further discussion)

how many of them have competed in small European comps (or Asian or Australian or South American or...)? Or how many of them are serious enough about Megaminx to know that suddenly decreasing the acceptable tile depth by 0.5mm would have a huge impact?

This is pretty important too, I don't care whether this is delegate or community voting, but the sample should definitely have a wide geographical spread and multiple world class cubers. Having a very similar group of voters simply let's problems and suggestions to get overlooked.

Also whilst Github is good, considering the two biggest cubing hubs are Speedsolving and Facebook (not counting Youtube) I think info should be cross-posted to these mediums more often.

 

[Lucas Garron]

I was going to write a longer reply, but I think I can summarize: I agree with almost everything from the last few posts.

There are flaws with the current system, but it's certainly better than before – and I'm glad we roughly agree on what kind of participation we would like. Let's head there.

Some comments:

I *do* hope the Regulations become more static, but that will still take a while.
In particular, we either need some more reshuffling (there is a lot of inconsistency in the way the articles are organized – and the Guidelines should probably go), or some sort of simplification like Arnaud has been arguing for. We should also to address every open issue (or decide that it isn't important enough).

Also, there is a tension between selecting experienced people vs. getting *full* representation. Experienced people will have views and biases that are a bit different from the kinds of things that a newcomer or more casual competitor would (15s inspection? Feet? +2 for misalignment?). Even Arnaud's list of suggestions will have a bias (or "like-mindedness").

Does anyone have suggestions for maintaining a voting body of cubers that 1) isn't tied to strict seniority criteria, and 2) is as easy as possible to maintain?
We need to be able to select people who can balance the mission of the WCA with practical reality.