[bestbits] Results of Best Bits steering committee election

[Jeremy Malcolm]

The results of the Best Bits steering committee election are in.

Ballots were sent to the 519 members of this list who have been members
for two months prior to the election, although some of these bounced. 
134 of these members clicked on the invitation email, but only 63 of
them followed through and completed the voting forum by clicking the
submit button on the page.  (The former figure might not be completely
accurate, because some corporate email systems will automatically click
on links in email, to check whether they are phishing or as part of a
malware scan.  But we can be pretty confident about the latter figure.)

Although we had more available positions on the steering committee than
nominees, because of the availability of "no candidate" as an option, I
have applied the criterion that in order to be elected to the steering
committee you must have had more people voting for you than voting for
"no candidate".  With 63 votes cast, this means that the threshold for
election was 32 votes.  In other words, if 31 people didn't want you on
the committee but 32 people did, you would be elected.

Of the 63 votes, 15 did not want a steering committee to be elected at
all; in other words they voted "no candidate" for every position.  Of
the remaining 48:

  * 3 voted for the election of a only single member
  * 4 voted for the election of only two members
  * 4 voted for the election of only three members
  * 12 voted for the election of only four members
  * 7 voted for the election of only five members
  * 18 voted for the election of all six members

The precise number of votes received for each candidate was as follows:

  * Nighat Dad: 38 votes
  * Poncelet Ileleji: 38 votes
  * Renata Ribeiro: 37 votes
  * Dave Burstein: 37 votes
  * Imran Ahmed Shah: 33 votes
  * Antonella Perini: 31 votes

This means that only one candidate received less than 32 votes, but only
a single vote less, which is virtually a rounding error!  So I feel bad
for Antonella Perini and I would like to point out to the new steering
committee that if they would like to co-opt her onto the committee as an
honorary non-voting member, past precedent would allow them to do this. 
Also, this would ensure that the steering committee has a 50/50% equal
gender balance, as well as giving effect to the most popular choice that
there should be a steering committee of six.  Nevertheless, I leave this
for the new committee to decide.

Congratulations to the new elected Best Bits committee members!  I would
also like offer my services to the new committee to assist them with
administrative duties, such as maintenance of the website and mailing
list, if required.

If anyone would like to review the raw data from the polling software in
order to verify the results as I have presented them, please let me know
and I will send it to you as a spreadsheet.

-- 
Jeremy Malcolm
Senior Global Policy Analyst
Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://eff.org
jmalcolm at eff.org

Tel: 415.436.9333 ext 161

:: Defending Your Rights in the Digital World ::

Public key: https://www.eff.org/files/2016/11/27/key_jmalcolm.txt
PGP fingerprint: 75D2 4C0D 35EA EA2F 8CA8 8F79 4911 EC4A EDDF 1122

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