Team polls restored, but future is unclear
We restored team polls because several Ubuntu teams require their use in their charter. They cannot easily switch to another service because it is not possible to organise the members to vote. We decided that to restore them while we decide what to do.
Option one: Contributors re-invent the UI so that setting up a poll is uncomplicated by silly restrictions and requirements. Many teams are not using Launchpad because they want condorcet polls. Launchpad may require them to keep the feature.
Option two: provide the information teams need to use another poll service. Team members can hide their email addresses, so it is not possible for the team admins to gather the member information to setup a poll. Honouring member privacy may require choosing or setting up a poll service that uses OpenId.
There is an unstated issue that options one and two do not address. It is also not possible to contact every member of team in Launchpad. How do team members ever know when a team admin creates a poll? Regardless of if the poll is in Launchpad, or in another service, members are unlikely to participate unless they happen to see the poll while visiting the team page in Launchpad. How often does that happen? Why would I visit my team’s page? I visit the teams I admin because I review membership proposals, moderate list mail and check on PPAs. I have no reason to visit the page of a team that I am just a member of.
January 11th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Is this something that can/should be implemented into the LoCo Directory instead of Launchpad? We currently have plans to expand to support any Launchpad teams, not just LoCo teams, so it would be an option in the (hopefully near) future.
January 11th, 2011 at 7:14 pm
I highly recommend you talk to mako (Benjamin Mako Hill) about hooking into Selectricity, as it’s incredibly likely any reasonable online voting replacement would take place using that. He’s an Ubuntu guy too 😉
January 11th, 2011 at 7:43 pm
Noted. Thank you for the suggestion.
January 12th, 2011 at 10:43 am
Chrish: I think perhaps that people are thinking too hard about this. Voters generally hear about important issues decision that they can participate in via “the grapevine“, as would be the case here. It is only important that somebody’s name is on the list of those eligible to vote, not whether their invite got lost in the post.
Email in this day-and-age—with the abundance of non-discriminating spam filters—already causes a certain amount of failed deliveries, even if the contact data does exist.