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?

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.

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.

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

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.)

Open paren for council chair in 2010!

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.

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.