Unicode Preferences Election
 

i just received an email asking me to vote on my favourite special characters.

upon logging in on http://maemo.org/vote/, i am asked to provide my email and a token from the mail.
on the next page i am supposed to choose the characters, but the fields are empty.

a quick debug shows that at line 167 there's an unterminated string constant.

this election should probably have been tested before sending out the mails asking people to vote...

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Yeah, happens at least with Opera 10.20 not sure about other browsers.
Managed to vote still as you can always modify the source :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Same problem here with Firefox 3.5.5...

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

you mean you saved the .htm page and corrected the javascript error? or does opera support on-the-fly editing nowadays? (haven't had it installed for years...)

regardless, i don't think any of this should be expected by the users, even if it's a vote about special characters :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

same in iron 4.0.227 (chromium), firefox 3.5.5, midori-git 20091118.

It's broken allright. ;)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

HMhm, and what does this poll has to do with Unicode? And could we have some context about why we vote? Preferred in which way?

Thanks :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

This has to be a joke. - Why would somebody want me to confess I prefer "(" over ")"?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Maybe a test? :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Hi,

Thanks to Ferenc we have patched this up temporarily - you no longer see a backslash, you see the text "backslash".

How did this happen? Easy - in the database we inserted '\\', '£' and '€' as options for the election. MySQL escaped \\ to \, which gets inserted in the javascript that constructs the candidate list, resulting in option4='\', instead of '\\'. We will get it fixed properly tomorrow by replacing € with €, and £ with £ and \\ replaced with \\\\. In the meantime, text it is.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

what about "^". I find ^ pretty important. Both to do ^^ as well as Exponentiation.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

In the meantime, could you elaborate on the purpose of the vote please?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I think it's about this: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/list...ommunity/55369.

Apparently, the hardware people want to know which keys to put on the keyboard.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Hmhm, and still, what's the point? :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I have got an interesting request from "the hardware guys". And I
thought of an interesting way to satisfy it.

The question is about hardware keyboards in mobile devices for different
languages. What characters to put, what characters to sacrifice? You
know it's a hot topic and maybe yourself have thought sometimes: why do
they put X which I don't used, while Y is missing?

So the team is doing their usual research, but they are also interested
in getting some direct feedback from maemo.org users. Sure, we can open
a Talk thread and see what happens but I was thinking of... using our
preferential voting tool + an invitation to all the maemo.org users to
vote. :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

OK, cheers, that's much clearer now. I too got a bit confused when I saw that email and didn't quite know what it was all about.

For future voting requests, it would help to add a little be of context in the email (e.g. is this an official Nokia initiative or some random poll initiated by a random member of the community? What is the purpose of the poll? Is it a poll that could have a direct influence on future hardware / software features or a more informal poll started out of curiosity).

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Crap! I wish I had this information before I voted. I kinda based my vote on the N900, and naturally didn't vote for stuff that was already accessible on the keyboard, eventhough i actually use it more than the stuff I voted for.
*bonk self*

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I'd like a way to rate them all equally highly except the currency symbols. I can't do that, can I?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

The context should have been given in the email and on the voting page. Now people have no idea what's it about, and results might not be usable for the purpose you are describing.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Oh, and perhaps we need to specify what language keybd we're voting for, unless we're all propeller heads after an easy life in the shell :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

qgil is going to dress up as the winning character!

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

So if "(" wins the vote, is there really going to be a keyboard with a "(" but not a ")"?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I suppose the email could have been more clear, along the lines that people have suggested. But my first reaction when I got it was how cool it is that direct member input was being solicited about the future of the platform. I hope this continues in the future.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Yes, I had assumed some context would be given in the election. Next time I will provide full text without assuming, sorry.

Having to set preferences is precisely the point since every key counts.

Voting a preferential system based on several languages was even more complicated so we decided to do the survey as it is. The results are anyway orientative and to be taken in the context of further research, including usage of different keyboard variants. Actually if you take out the currency characters, all the rest are mostly equally used or unused in all languages.

And yes, if you like the experiment and there is a wide participation making the survey useful we will think about using this way of gathering feedback in future occasions.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

A thing I miss there are the special/meta/modifer/... characters too :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

If you miss a character then it's either a more stable candidate to show up in a keyboard or something really weird.

btw I have proposed to restart the survey
http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/003472.html

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I agree that the email and maemo.org/vote page should have contained more information about what this was about, as it was completely unclear to me. Obviously it's too late to change the emails that were sent out, but can some explanation be added to the web page, to at least inform people who haven't voted or followed the link yet?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

the new mail is much better, and the voting system works correctly now :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Shouldn't ( and ) have been a single item? There's no way anyone would ever have just one of them is there?

Also... different countries get different keyboards anyway, shouldn't we select some kind of country code when we vote or does it automatically register our countries?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I'm missing the option for "provide a four-row keyboard so that we can have ALL of these symbols, AND the caret (^), AND the digits 0-9 without shifting (and also people with accents in their languages can have all four arrow keys unshifted)".

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

What about the ESC key? :)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I didn't get the new email and my link for the vote in the old one still leads to a broken page where I can't actually vote. What's the link for the working election page?

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Even if someone gave you the link, you wouldn't be able to vote without a new "token" that is sent in the second email, as all the existing tokens were reset. Have you checked any junk mail folder? Hopefully dneary can help if you still can't find the second email.

Re: Keyboard characters Preferences Election
 

Hi all,

The survey for the special characters on your keyboard finished last week. After the election, looking at the votes, there were some particularities which made generating useful results a little tricky:

* '(' got by far the most votes, and ')' came 8th or 9th on first preferences - but got by far the most 2nd preferences. It was clear many people voted '(' and ')' 1 and 2 in that order
* Some characters got a large number of first preference votes, but almost no follow-on preferences (Euro, pound and pipe)
* There is no election - so deciding how many seats to allocate for a transferable vote was nonsensical at worst, useless at best.

So - exceptionally, for the survey, I decided to use the Borda count. This gives a good approximation of the order of preference people have.

Here's how it works: With 14 candidates, a number 1 preference is worth 13 points, a number 2 is worth 12 points, and so on - a number 14 or no vote at all are both worth 0. By adding the number of points across all ballots, we get a good idea of who appeared higher on the preferences.

Without further ado, here are the results:

http://maemo.org/vote/results.php?election_id=8

In order of preference:

• Char Score
• '(' 13673
• ')' 12807
• '&' 10602
• '=' 10025
• '_' 8824
• '$' 8604
• '<' 8358
• '>' 8335
• '|' 8267
• '%' 7683
• '\' 6658
• '~' 6375
• '€' 4648
• '£' 2165

The results need to be taken with a pinch of salt - and perhaps examined more closely. There was no residency information which might have shown how important the pound sign is to UK residents, or the euro sign to (other) EU residents.

You can download the votes and play with them yourself at http://maemo.org/vote/blt.php?election_id=8 and read about reproducing the results at http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo.org_team...ection_results

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

fwiw you can follow some additional discussion in the community-list: http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/mae...er/003608.html

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I like the fact that 1416 valid ballots were submitted for this vote, vs. the 298 valid ballots submitted for the last council election.

I will be doggedly optimistic here and say that this bodes well for increased community participation in future council elections.

(EDIT: Also, the results as posted by dneary make sense to me.)

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Open paren for council chair in 2010!

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

I'll put this into perspective: since this was a survey rather than an election, ballots were issued to everyone with a maemo.org account - roughly 24,000 ballots - giving a 6% participation rate. The 298 votes were from over 2300 people eligible to vote in council elections, a participation rate close to 13%.

Cheers,
Dave.

Re: Unicode Preferences Election
 

Hm, so much for my dogged optimism. On a bike shed issue like keyboard characters, we only got 6% participation...

On the other hand, the "spamming" nature of the ballots (sent to possibly large numbers of people who may not have any current interest or involvement in the community) muddies the waters yet again, making it impossible to really say anything at all about participation rates. :(