Re: [photo-3d] New poll for photo-3d

[John W Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 22:08:34 -0000
>From: "Mike Kersenbrock" <michaelk@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: Re: [photo-3d] New poll for photo-3d  

>   If I understand correctly, the objection to "anyone" starting
>a poll is that doing so causes a message announcing it to be
>mailed to everyone.  This causes people not interested in polls
>to be upset in having to receive it.  It can't logically be
>that the poll exists in the onelist polling section because
>anyone upset with polls can just ignore them.

>   Therefore, if generation of un-interesting poll-postings is limited
>to those "approved" by the moderator, then to be logically consistent,
>this should apply to all postings that may be uninteresting to
>someone on the list (and therefore a waste of time and bandwidth).

>   Therefore the list should be fully moderated.  All postings
>should be sent to the moderator, and the moderator posts/forwards
>ALL postings that make it to the list as a whole.

>   In other words, voting for moderator control of polls is a 
>vote for full moderation of the newsgroup.  Through perverse
>logic anyway.

I do not support full moderation of the lists - I think they work much
better the way they are, with the oversight of the moderator(s).

My concern about the polls is that they could result in changes in
policies of the mailing lists, without due process and in directions that
I might not like.

It could be argued that this is not a risk, because the "government"
of the list is a dictatorship, but in practice, Bob W. has often shown
an inclination to try to accommodate the desires of the group at large.
So if Bob thinks the majority of the membership of the lists wants a
certain policy change, then there is a good chance he will implement it.

Policy changes have been made in the past, and the usual method has
involved an open discussion of the issues on the list, with all readers
having the opportunity to make their views known, the readers having
an opportunity to respond to these views, the original posters having
the opportunity to respond to the responses, and so on. This process
gives everyone a chance to see all aspects of the situation, think about
the implications of changes, and so on, and generally either allows a
consensus to emerge, or distills down into several distinct options,
at which point a poll would certainly be appropriate to determine
which option is most popular. Having an "official" poll allows for the 
exact wording of the poll questions to be formulated and agreed upon,
to make sure that the various viewpoints are accurately represented.

With an "unofficial" policy poll, there may have been little or no
discussion or presentation of points of view, consensus building,
or agreement on the wording of the poll questions. The wording of the
questions can be "loaded" to encourage a particular outcome. This might
not be a problem, if it were not for the probability that the outcomes
of such polls could be used as arguments for policy changes for the lists,
and the possibility that such arguments could affect policy. I don't
think Bob would automatically obey the results of an unofficial poll
that he thought to be unfair, but there might be some influence from
a poll that was not blatantly unfair or biased, but also not quite fair
and unbiased. 

Results of such unofficial polls could also be used as arguments to 
influence the readership of the lists, by giving an unbalanced impression
of what the general interests of the readership are. In other words, if I
can use the outcome of a tricky poll to convince most of the list readers
of my claim that most of the readers want a certain policy, then many
people may be willing to go along with that policy just because they think
everyone wants it, even if they personally do not want it.

A third difficulty of unofficial polls is the degree of response from the
readership. If there's an official policy poll, I would be inclined to
respond, because I care what happens to the lists. If there's an unofficial
poll, I might still care, but choose not to respond because I don't want
to encourage unofficial policy polls by participating, and don't want to
give weight to the output of the poll by allowing the pollster to include
me in the number of people who responded. Also, official polls should be
fairly infrequent - with frequent unofficial policy polls, I might avoid
participating just because I don't think I should have to be continually
and frequently defending the policies I like. For all of these reasons,
an unofficial policy poll is likely to provide a much less balanced
representation of the views of the readership than an official poll.

I certainly have no objection to people occasionally polling to find out
what kind of film other readers use, what kind of cameras they have, whether
they've ever painted their dog blue just to take a 3D photo of a blue dog,
and so on. But the very first unofficial poll after the switch to the 
new server was in fact a list policy poll, and did in fact have questions 
that I considered to be highly leading, and this was not a good precedent 
for the use of polls on these lists.

John R


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