<blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote"><pre>On Mon, 2008-03-24 at 19:34 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote: > > That is, rather than getting 7 > > widely liked "centrists", you'd get 7 people who whose appeal is more > > representative of segments of the community doing the voting. This > > inherently leads to more debate and discussion, and in theory at > > least, better ultimate decisions. I think the above quote is hilarious. You might get better ultimate decisions, or you might get more balkanization and more people walking away in a huff. Which we have MORE than enough of already. I think I'd be reasonably happy with 7 widely liked centrists. -sv</pre></blockquote><div>that's a very valid point seth. we discuss this aspect of proportional representation in the pro's and con's section here: <a href="http://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html">http://rangevoting.org/PropRep.html</a> it may well be that the centrist approach is more productive for your situation. though i don't know that walking away in a huff is necessarily a huge fear. i'm a (highly opinionated) developer at a san francisco web site for a large corporation, and i often run into huge conflicts of opinion with my relatively old school technical lead and various co-workers. i'm barking about how cool ruby on rails is, while they are talking about java and xslt, and how lame the whole agile development paradigm is. yet we manage to learn a lot from our debates, and i think we often come up with better solutions than we would if we were more like-minded. there's always someone with a radically different perspective than yours, and that usually helps us find the strengths and weaknesses in our respective ideas. in any case, any kind of range voting is exciting to me. but i think it's interesting that you're choosing to make the scale based on the number of candidates. presumably that's so that, if you wanted to, you could give every candidate a different score, to indicate your full order of preference. some people do express to us that they might not like using e.g. a 0-5 scale, because there might be two candidates who would get a 70 and a 75 on a 0-100 scale, but that gets rounded down with 0-5, and so they have the same score. you might be interested to know that the haiku os team used range voting for their icon selection: <a href="http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html">http://rangevoting.org/HaikuIcon.html</a> best, clay </div>