# Delegate/Community Voting



## Lucas Garron (Apr 24, 2014)

*Please note that this idea is on its very early stages.* Please don't just voice your dislike for some aspect of this that may or may not happen. Constructive concerns and ideas are welcome, though.

I've spent a long time thinking about how to handle controversial changes.
Sometimes, it is important to make a decision against the preferences of competitors (the removal of POPs comes to mind as a classic example).
However, many decisions are ultimately a matter of making one choice over another. In this case, it would be wisest to lay out the important pros and cons of a choice, and listen to the resulting preferences of those who are experienced with the Regulations.
The WRC already tries to to that, but it's often hard to tell if the apparent community opinion is true, or just the result of some very vocal people. Very few people try to consider all the fact, and make a rational choice.

A fairly straightforward idea for improving this is to put controversial changes to a Delegate vote. If most Delegates prefer something, it's probably not a bad idea (and hopefully usually a good one).

It might be reasonable to extend this to experienced community members, but we have to think carefully about that would work.
We'd definitely welcome thoughts on how to involve people who are experienced enough with the Regulations that giving them a vote would be a positive contribution to the sport.

There is a GitHub issue tracking this topic.
Any progress is sure to be documented there, although I'll be monitoring this thread.


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## Kirjava (Apr 24, 2014)

I kind of expected a poll here. 

I think the trouble would be getting a fair pool of people to vote.


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## AmazingCuber (Apr 24, 2014)

I think that delegate voting would be a very nice idea, since they are some of the most experienced on WCA competitions and are some of the only people I trust to make purely rational decisions, looking at both pros and cons. I do think though that there should be established a official platform, outside some specific forums, for WCA members to discuss the changes. I am, however, against community voting as many people wouldn't consider all sides and couldn't make as rational decisions as the delegates. I also don't think that allowing some people to vote would be good, as it would create a sense of unfairness.
I think the perfect constellation would be delegate voting, as they are very competent in those subjects and have worked hard to do what they do. This should be put together with an international discussion forum which would reach all kinds of competitors (this could be put together with the idea of being allowed to log in on the WCA website) to get a general idea of what the community wants to help the delegates.
Thank you for putting so much time in the WCA, Lucas!


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## mycube (Apr 24, 2014)

I like this basic idea.

But for me it would be necessary to be informed about any decisions the delegates should take before they vote. Because then the job of the delegates should be to inform their local community and have to vote in their way, after they had some time to give their opinion. So this would lead to an expansion of the delegates work to be representative for his national or continental community.


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## Erik (Apr 24, 2014)

Nice to have a separate thread on this. Before I repeat myself my comments can be found here: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/s...or-all-puzzles&p=972037&viewfull=1#post972037 
and here: http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/s...or-all-puzzles&p=972270&viewfull=1#post972270

Basically I think voting is a good idea, but I am conviced not all delegates would be suited or better said some non-delegates would be more suited to vote. People like Arnaud van Galen would make great delegates, but aren't just because there are already enough delegates in the area. Picking the right people is the challenge. Might not be easy, but definitely the right way.


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## Methuselah96 (Apr 24, 2014)

We could follow the example of the American government and have two houses of legislature. One body could be the delegates and another body could be voted on by the community. Or we could just cut the delegates out of the equation. Both of those would require a lot of work, but it could be done. (You would then have to figure out community voting in order to appoint the one body of legislatures which could be hard.)


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## AlexMaass (Apr 24, 2014)

If you want to have a fair place to poll the community, it should be at competitions, it would be biased if they just voted on the forums, since it does not represent people who don't go on the forums.


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## TheNextFeliks (Apr 24, 2014)

Methuselah96 said:


> We could follow the example of the American government and have two houses of legislature. One body could be the delegates and another body could be voted on by the community. Or we could just cut the delegates out of the equation. Both of those would require a lot of work, but it could be done. (You would then have to figure out community voting in order to appoint the one body of legislatures which could be hard.)



And see how well things get done here? 

I think delegates for sure due to their knowledge. The community, I feel, especially for non-experienced cubers, often act on their opinion rather than what is better for the community. I see people saying all the time, "We should do/change/add this because I like/don't like this or it is fun." Those aren't really grounds for change. We should pass a law because I like it. You should pass one because it benefits people.
I always felt the WCA was more of a fair oligarchy than a democracy and it functions quite well.


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## mycube (Apr 24, 2014)

AlexMaass said:


> If you want to have a fair place to poll the community, it should be at competitions, it would be biased if they just voted on the forums, since it does not represent people who don't go on the forums.



So how about people not going to competitions because there are no competitions close enough?


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## Methuselah96 (Apr 24, 2014)

mycube said:


> So how about people not going to competitions because there are no competitions close enough?



Then why should they get to vote if it doesn't affect them?



TheNextFeliks said:


> And see how well things get done here?
> 
> I think delegates for sure due to their knowledge. The community, I feel, especially for non-experienced cubers, often act on their opinion rather than what is better for the community. I see people saying all the time, "We should do/change/add this because I like/don't like this or it is fun." Those aren't really grounds for change. We should pass a law because I like it. You should pass one because it benefits people.
> I always felt the WCA was more of a fair oligarchy than a democracy and it functions quite well.



I was just putting ideas out there. I like the way we have it now, personally, but it doesn't really matter that much to me.


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## cubernya (Apr 25, 2014)

Methuselah96 said:


> Then why should they get to vote if it doesn't affect them?



Official rules are still followed outside of a competition (except for some like stickerless cubes)


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## Methuselah96 (Apr 25, 2014)

theZcuber said:


> Official rules are still followed outside of a competition (*except for some* like stickerless cubes)



except for the ones that we're talking about that are controversial that we're voting on and won't change outside of competition anyway...


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## Ranzha (Apr 25, 2014)

Methuselah96 said:


> except for the ones that we're talking about that are controversial that we're voting on and won't change outside of competition anyway...



There are many regulations that could be applied at home that cubers simply don't observe, like proper attempt start procedure, using competition-legal scrambles, shielding themselves with a blind folder for BLD events, etc.
If prominent people in the WCA chose to talk about cutting inspection time to 10 seconds and it became a change in the Regs, wouldn't most solvers switch to inspection for 10s?


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## Erik (Apr 25, 2014)

Methuselah96 said:


> We could follow the example of the American government...


Sorry but I had to stop reading after this xD



theZcuber said:


> Official rules are still followed outside of a competition (except for some like stickerless cubes)


I remember getting flamed here because I noticed some irregularities here: 
http://www.speedsolving.com/forum/s...12-(7-84-avg5)&p=964150&viewfull=1#post964150

Just to be clear (trying to prevent some posts here): I don't think anyone thinks it would be a good idea to let ALL cubers who ever competed vote (posts by mycube and AlexMaass, but I could be wrong). That means my mother could vote as well xD (nothing against her obviously, but she has no idea about what is going on...)


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## AlexMaass (Apr 25, 2014)

Erik said:


> Sorry but I had to stop reading after this xD
> 
> 
> I remember getting flamed here because I noticed some irregularities here:
> ...


Well what cubers should be allowed to vote then? People who have been to a certain amount of comps or something?


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## kinch2002 (Apr 25, 2014)

I think some sort of voting is a great idea. I also agree with trying to figure out a way of including various other community members, although that would indeed be difficult.

I haven't really thought through this, but it sprung to mind: If we really want other members of the community, how about allowing each country a number of votes (not the same for every country). Delegates would decide who else from their country should be on the voting team.

As for what the vote would mean, I see a few options:
1. The result only acts as guidance for the Board
2. A certain threshold must be met in order for it to go to the Board for a final decision.
3. A certain threshold being met would mean that it goes through automatically.

As an aside, I expressed my desire for delegate voting a few years ago, and was told by a board member (now ex-board member) that he didn't like the idea.


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## Goosly (Apr 25, 2014)

kinch2002 said:


> I haven't really thought through this, but it sprung to mind: If we really want other members of the community, how about allowing each country a number of votes (not the same for every country). Delegates would decide who else from their country should be on the voting team.



I was having similar thoughts. The hard part would probably be how to decide the number of voters every country gets. It could be based on the total amount of cubers from that country that have competed (for example that number divided by 50).


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## Deleted member 19792 (Apr 25, 2014)

kinch2002 said:


> I think some sort of voting is a great idea. I also agree with trying to figure out a way of including various other community members, although that would indeed be difficult.
> 
> I haven't really thought through this, but it sprung to mind: If we really want other members of the community, how about allowing each country a number of votes (not the same for every country). Delegates would decide who else from their country should be on the voting team.
> 
> ...




How about delegate representation? Delegates from an area represent a vote from the community.


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## kinch2002 (Apr 25, 2014)

strakerak said:


> How about delegate representation? Delegates from an area represent a vote from the community.


If the delegates really do listen to their people and vote accordingly, then that's effectively just a standard community vote, which is what we don't want due to uninformed voting.
If they don't then it's just a delegate vote


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## Lucas Garron (Apr 25, 2014)

kinch2002 said:


> I haven't really thought through this, but it sprung to mind: If we really want other members of the community, how about allowing each country a number of votes (not the same for every country). Delegates would decide who else from their country should be on the voting team.



If Delegates can decide, they can also bias things towards people with matching preferences. Getting a vote becomes politics, not cubing.

Did you see the suggestion from Kit in the first post's GitHub link? It's still the most reasonable one I've heard, given all the discussion in this thread.



> Allow one vote for each competitor who:
> 
> out of all competitors in their region ranked by number of competitions attended, is in the top X% (e.g. region=continent, X=5)
> has been to at least one competition in the past year


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## Mikel (Apr 25, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> If Delegates can decide, they can also bias things towards people with matching preferences. Getting a vote becomes politics, not cubing.
> 
> Did you see the suggestion from Kit in the first post's GitHub link? It's still the most reasonable one I've heard, given all the discussion in this thread.



That sounds like a good idea. The next thing to do would be to establish what the regions divisions would be.


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## TeddyKGB (Apr 25, 2014)

You could let all delegates get a vote and then let delegates nominate other members of the community to also get votes which would need to be seconded by another delegate or two before they were allowed a vote.


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## AvGalen (May 2, 2014)

Currently it is possible to have a regulation change because 1 person proposes it, nobody opposes it, so it is considered accepted. This shouldn't happen
But you also don't want to make a community poll about every little tweak.

* Polling the community should only be done once in a while (like a referendum)
* Having a decision made by one person should only be theoretically possible (like a presedential veto)

What you really want is that decisions can be made quickly by a sufficiently large and diverse group without a high barrier of entrance
Who should be allowed to make those decisions? In my opinion you would qualify if you fit one of these criteria
* If you have been a delegate at 5 competitions
* If you have been an organiser at 5 competitions
* If you have been competing during 5 years
* If you have been competing in 20 competitions
* If you have been competing in 5 countries
* (and you cannot currently be banned by the WCA, duh)

If a proposal for a regulation change gets a majority with a minimum of 10 votes from those people that sounds like a good idea to me.
And all regulation changes should be suggested and put to vote before December 1 of a year with all resulting changes applied to the regulations that would become active on January 1


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## Lucas Garron (May 3, 2014)

AvGalen said:


> Currently it is possible to have a regulation change because 1 person proposes it, nobody opposes it, so it is considered accepted. This shouldn't happen
> But you also don't want to make a community poll about every little tweak.



One thing I've learned is that most competitors *don't* care about most of the Regulations.
Quite a few of these changes should simply be made when they are needed (but with public documentation).

Stuff like removing qualification rounds should come under some scrutiny by the WRC, but for most issues people just want the WRC to do the right thing in the background. I'm _de facto_ the only one pushing changes through, and it's hard to judge when we just need a decision, and when we need to get more information about what we should be doing.

But getting more information is hard. I'm trying to post more and more about things on this forum; it's not always productive.
If we do end up with Delegate voting, we do need to figure out what is meaningful enough to go to a Delegate vote.

(I know you'd probably prefer stuff to be left out of the Regulations if it is an uncontroversial detail, but I think we need to make things work with our current system until we have something solid to replace it.)




AvGalen said:


> What you really want is that decisions can be made quickly by a sufficiently large and diverse group without a high barrier of entrance


Exactly.

We somehow need to be able to get everyone's feedback for the proposal (what details/pros/cons should be in it?), and then everyone's vote. This should go as fast as possible, while still giving everyone who cares the chance to participate.



AvGalen said:


> Who should be allowed to make those decisions? In my opinion you would qualify if you fit one of these criteria
> * If you have been a delegate at 5 competitions
> * If you have been an organiser at 5 competitions
> * If you have been competing during 5 years
> ...


This suffers from the kind of long arbitrary details that people criticize the Regulations for. 

I'd prefer if we can figure out something more simple, similar to Kit's X% suggestions.



AvGalen said:


> If a proposal for a regulation change gets a majority with a minimum of 10 votes from those people that sounds like a good idea to me.


Are you just throwing out a number, or do you really mean 10? That sounds really low to me.



AvGalen said:


> And all regulation changes should be suggested and put to vote before December 1 of a year with all resulting changes applied to the regulations that would become active on January 1


I've seen a few requests that we should be responding to things during the year and making changes as needed. I don't really know what's best.


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## kinch2002 (May 3, 2014)

Kit's top percentile of people in a region ranked by competitions attended has some flaws.

The list would be far too biased against change. People not on that list will constantly be playing catch up, sometimes in an almost-impossible situation. What if I start cubing when someone else has attended 100 competitions over the last 7 years - (this is the case for many European cubers)? I don't stand a chance of catching them.

What if someone is in an area that has very few comps. I'm sure there are community members who contribute a lot and are very knowledgeable, yet cannot attend many competitions. The converse is true.

Basically I don't think that number of competitions attended is a good ranking system. I think a non-data-driven approach to choosing people is best, just like the delegate selection process.


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## XTowncuber (May 3, 2014)

AvGalen said:


> * If you have been competing in 5 countries



Out of curiosity, why this one?


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## hcfong (May 3, 2014)

With regards to Kit's proposal, instead of using continents are regions, we could use the regional division of the WCA. That gives us 10 regions and perhaps the Board and WRC can each have a vote as well. I think the advantage of this is that the regions are smaller, giving more people the opportunity to make it into the top x-%, while still keeping the number of regions managable. I think this partly addresses Daniel's concern of people having to play catch-up, even though this remains an issue in Western Europe.

I also think that in this context, residency rather than nationality should determine which region someone represents.


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## TMOY (May 3, 2014)

To adress the catch-up issue, a possibility could be to count, instead of the total number of comps, the number of comps attended in the past year, or in the past two or three years if one year is too short. that way, anybody would have the possibility to catch up at any time without having to attend an insanely high number of comps.


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## Carrot (May 3, 2014)

XTowncuber said:


> Out of curiosity, why this one?



Different countries have different cultures/communities, so by competing in different countries you get to see how different countries/communities interprets the regulations. Obviously it is WRC's intentions that the regulations are interpreted the same worldwide, but unfortunately this is not the case.


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## TheOneOnTheLeft (May 3, 2014)

Is it a possibility that there could be an application process to get a vote? I realise that the difficulty then becomes having a board of people who have the time to dedicate to approving or rejecting applications, and doing so in an unbiased way (so they aren't approving only those people who will side with them on the majority of issues). If we could get a fair approval system in place though, it should filter out the people who aren't particularly concerned with what the regulations are, as they won't apply. The approval criteria would probably tend towards the kind of things Arnaud suggested, but they can be assessed more subjectively, to avoid the issue Dan pointed out, and make it more possible for (relatively) new cubers to be allowed to vote without being expected to catch up with those who've been part of the community for >5 years. Just an idea, I accept that it comes with its own set of problems to be solved.


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## AvGalen (May 5, 2014)

I was under the assumption that (delegate) voting would be for all changes, not just some.
Given how many people would qualify under my suggested rules for getting a vote I think it is reasonable to assume that if a proposal doesn't get 10 votes it wasn't worth changing it. And you don't need to get 10 votes, you need to get a majority with a minimum of 10 votes. So nobody can push through bad decisions
The percentage proposal suffers from "everyone in Africa would qualify". My proposal suffers from TLDR but could be summarised as "if you can be assumed to know your stuff".

Making changes during the year should only be necessary in the first few years of the WCA, but not anymore. What I am trying to accomplish is that everyone knows when they should check for new rules and that nobody can push a rule through at the last moment.

Thanks for explaining why I added "international experience" as a way to earn a vote. There are a few things that are different internationally and we need people that know about these things.
I think I made a decent proposal for proposal-voting, but it looks like what you really wanted was a "the WRC/me should be able to do whatever they want, but if they don't know what to do they should be able to ask their friends for advice"


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## Laura O (May 5, 2014)

I totally agree with Daniel: the number of competitions is definitely not an indicator for the interest and knowledge of regulations.
I know competitors who bothered about regulations at their very first competition and others who didn't know if a missing edge is a DNF or not although they attended more than 20 competitions.

Apart from this criteria discussions: did anyone ever think about how these votings can be organised? I'm quite sure that the WCA does not have e-mail addresses of the competitors. It's also not sure if the delegates or the organizers keep them. Therefore it probably requires a great amount of effort to collect this data. Meanwhile it has to be kept up-to-date.


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## AvGalen (May 5, 2014)

I am pretty sure that a simple yes/no/blanc voting form for an active list of people would be within Lucas skill to build. I don't know if github supports something like a "collect signatures approval workflow" but that would be ideal.


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## Lucas Garron (May 6, 2014)

hcfong said:


> That gives us 10 regions and perhaps the Board and WRC can each have a vote as well.


I'm not sure what you mean. Where does the number 10 come from? (There is 1 World region, 6 continents, and a whole bunch of countries.)



hcfong said:


> I also think that in this context, residency rather than nationality should determine which region someone represents.


This might be more trouble than it's worth. If we're going by region, it might be okay to ignore the small overhead of international movement.



TMOY said:


> To adress the catch-up issue, a possibility could be to count, instead of the total number of comps, the number of comps attended in the past year, or in the past two or three years if one year is too short. that way, anybody would have the possibility to catch up at any time without having to attend an insanely high number of comps.



I think this is worth thinking about, but we need a way of picking numbers that isn't as controversial as scramble filtering.




TheOneOnTheLeft said:


> Is it a possibility that there could be an application process to get a vote? I realise that the difficulty then becomes having a board of people who have the time to dedicate to approving or rejecting applications, and doing so in an unbiased way (so they aren't approving only those people who will side with them on the majority of issues).



Yeah, but as you mentioned it comes with its own problems. My main concern is that if we have to set up *any* sort of manual mechanism, things might slow down and get worse.
Consider the WCA website. A few people are in charge, a whole bunch of people have the authority to contribute and make things happen, but almost nothing moves. (It's a volunteer thing, so it's not anyone's blame in particular. But setting up yet another small committee doesn't magically mean what ehy were mean to do will happen.)



AvGalen said:


> I was under the assumption that (delegate) voting would be for all changes, not just some.


I originally wrote a longer answer to this, but: No, not yet.

Maybe in the future, if this proves to be a good idea that everyone is comfortable with.



AvGalen said:


> My proposal suffers from TLDR but could be summarised as "if you can be assumed to know your stuff".
> 
> Sort of. I wish we had a more concise way to determine people who know their stuff, then.
> 
> ...


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## Bob (May 6, 2014)

I would be in support of delegate voting. A community vote can be fine, too, but I actually do not like any of the criteria I've heard so far...and no, I don't have a criteria in mind myself.


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## qqwref (May 6, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> This is how the Regulations used to work.
> Ever since I poked Tyson and he had me start the WRC, I've been trying to make things more open. Say what you want about our GitHub repo, but at least nearly everything WRC/Regulations-related is documented now.
> 
> But I'm serious when I say that I believe that most people don't want to be making the Regulations. They just want the Regulations to have the right things, and only want direct say when they have an opinion on a (usually) controversial topic.


I think what Arnaud is saying is that there seems to be a tendency to get a bunch of like-minded people together, and then use that as an excuse to push significant regulation changes through without much regard for other points of view. You have a bunch of different people on the WRC, but how many of them have competed in small European comps (or Asian or Australian or South American or...)? Or how many of them are serious enough about Megaminx to know that suddenly decreasing the acceptable tile depth by 0.5mm would have a huge impact? You may have a group of people that you personally like, but what you really need is enough diversity to get a sense of what the global community wants, rather than an echo chamber that makes a problematic idea seem to work until it doesn't.


As a side note, I'd like to point out that looking for people who approach regulation-writing in a certain way may itself be biasing the people who get chosen (and not just in terms of nationality). Remember that people from different cultures, or those who did not grow up in nerd groups, or those who are of an older generation, may think of things quite differently than you. Github is one example of this - while it may seem simple and natural to you, I assure you there are others who might as well be navigating a website written in Linear B. I'm not saying you have to change everything, just that you should realize that approaching things differently is not an indicator that someone is unfit for the committee.


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## Erik (May 6, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> ...might slow down...
> Heh, I would love if the WRC didn't have much to do except handle some major changes in the sport.
> ...Of course. But building it takes time...



Out of sincere curiousity: I notice you talk about the "danger" of things slowing down and the necessity of making quick decision and "getting stuff done". Apart from discussing and trying to repair rare big issues like the controversy after the new regulations about tile thickness, logo's, retroactive record (which were partly controversial because they were pushed through too quickly) I can hardly see the need of being lightning fast at making new versions of the regulations.

Mostly it is just working on fixing relatively small detailed wordings of which the majority can wait for next years regs, or if you like a half-year change cycle. Can you elaborate on this?

I assume that when you use a (significantly) big pool of well qualified people to make a decision, the chances of having to fix big stuff afterwards will drop anyway.


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## hcfong (May 6, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> I'm not sure what you mean. Where does the number 10 come from? (There is 1 World region, 6 continents, and a whole bunch of countries.)


I'm talking about the 10 regions which are headed by a senior delegate: https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/delegates


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## Tim Major (May 6, 2014)

qqwref said:


> I think what Arnaud is saying is that there seems to be a tendency to get a bunch of like-minded people together, and then use that as an excuse to push significant regulation changes through



I think this is pretty important. The only time changes should be made is when it is beneficial to make those changes. See Megaminx changes... beneficial? Well it makes things more consistent I guess but the cons obviously outweighed the pros (I was not personally effected, using a stickered Mega, but I think if current top 10 solvers are effected by a change it needs further discussion)



qqwref said:


> how many of them have competed in small European comps (or Asian or Australian or South American or...)? Or how many of them are serious enough about Megaminx to know that suddenly decreasing the acceptable tile depth by 0.5mm would have a huge impact?



This is pretty important too, I don't care whether this is delegate or community voting, but the sample should definitely have a wide geographical spread and multiple world class cubers. Having a very similar group of voters simply let's problems and suggestions to get overlooked.

Also whilst Github is good, considering the two biggest cubing hubs are Speedsolving and Facebook (not counting Youtube) I think info should be cross-posted to these mediums more often.


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## Lucas Garron (May 6, 2014)

I was going to write a longer reply, but I think I can summarize: I agree with almost everything from the last few posts.

There are flaws with the current system, but it's certainly better than before – and I'm glad we roughly agree on what kind of participation we would like. Let's head there.

Some comments:

I *do* hope the Regulations become more static, but that will still take a while.
In particular, we either need some more reshuffling (there is a lot of inconsistency in the way the articles are organized – and the Guidelines should probably go), or some sort of simplification like Arnaud has been arguing for. We should also to address every open issue (or decide that it isn't important enough).

Also, there is a tension between selecting experienced people vs. getting *full* representation. Experienced people will have views and biases that are a bit different from the kinds of things that a newcomer or more casual competitor would (15s inspection? Feet? +2 for misalignment?). Even Arnaud's list of suggestions will have a bias (or "like-mindedness").

Does anyone have suggestions for maintaining a voting body of cubers that 1) isn't tied to strict seniority criteria, and 2) is as easy as possible to maintain?
We need to be able to select people who can balance the mission of the WCA with practical reality.


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## Laura O (May 6, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> I think it's definitely an *indicator*. What's more, it's objective, and doesn't take any work to figure out for a competitor.
> 
> I do take your point.
> At her first competition, I once asked a friend to read Article A before judging, and she was almost better than some "experienced" judges.



My explanation might have been a bit misleading.
Well, someone who decides about regulation changes should be representing the community (even if it is the local community), I think everyone agrees on that. So a reason to vote for removing feet should not be "I don't like feet, it s*cks" but something like "feet has a lot of appeal to the audience, but it's actually not very popular and quite time-assuming". And this is nothing that just comes from competing often or in a number of countries, but from being interested in these topics and also taking them seriously. This is probably arrogant and a bit harsh, but when I apply several of criteria mentioned in this thread, I find more than a few people who don't have this competency from my point of view.
That's why I would prefer a recommendation system to static criteria. A single recommendation from one delegate might be biased towards personal interests and extending this to two or more might disregard competitors in some regions, but I still think that this is more reliable and representing the community better.


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## aashritspidey (May 6, 2014)

Why not allow one country one vote.. All cubers from a country can vote, And the majority will be considered the vote of that country


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## AvGalen (May 6, 2014)

I hear a lot of "we would like to do more, but we don't have the manpower" and at the same time (qualified) people are applying but not accepted.
It seems like all the focus has been on getting things organised and documented in github, but almost nobody is using it.
It seems like the newest regulations are the most controversial, need the most discussion and are likely to be (partially) changed/reverted again.

From the outside it looks like the regulations and WRC need a big overhaul. Maybe we can have a Skype/FaceBook/Hangout meeting sometime to discuss this in a much more efficient way than "2 TLDR posts on a forum every 24 hours"


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## hcfong (May 6, 2014)

Lucas Garron said:


> Does anyone have suggestions for maintaining a voting body of cubers that 1) isn't tied to strict seniority criteria, and 2) is as easy as possible to maintain?
> We need to be able to select people who can balance the mission of the WCA with practical reality.



I am very much in favour of keeping things small, and do things at a local level. I don't think the WCA as a whole needs to set detailed criteria for who is eligible to be on a voting body. Just set a number of essential criteria and maintain the voting body on a regional scale. In summary, my suggestion would be:

- The WCA sets essential criteria. My suggestion would be: Must be an active cuber (been to a competition within the last 12 months) and must have the support of the local cubing community.
- The WCA decides the votes distribution, for example in proportion with the number of active cubers in a region. So a region with more active cubers have more voters.
- Each region (my suggestion would be regions headed by a senior delegate) maintains its own voting body. They decide how members of the voting community as selected, in line with the essential criteria set by the WCA.
- To ensure the voting body is up-to-date, a new voting body is selected every 2 years.

I believe this idea has a number of advantages:
- By maintaining the voting body locally, it will result in less work for the WCA.
- It allows for regional discretion in selecting suitable people. 
- By organising it locally, the members of the voting body are much closer to the community the represent, than when they are selected by the WCA as a whole.

Of course, this idea is not perfect and there are lots of other ways to do it. But I think it's a decent idea and fairly low maintainance.


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## uberCuber (May 6, 2014)

hcfong said:


> - The WCA sets essential criteria. My suggestion would be: Must be an active cuber (been to a competition within the last 12 months) and must have the support of the local cubing community.



Being active is definitely important, but I'd suggest something longer. One can still be an active and knowledgeable member of the community while living in an area that doesn't have competitions very often. I don't see the way competitions run changing so drastically that everyone who hasn't competed in a year and a half has to be considered 'behind the times.'


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## hcfong (May 6, 2014)

uberCuber said:


> Being active is definitely important, but I'd suggest something longer. One can still be an active and knowledgeable member of the community while living in an area that doesn't have competitions very often. I don't see the way competitions run changing so drastically that everyone who hasn't competed in a year and a half has to be considered 'behind the times.'



That's not my point. My point is that someone who hasn't been to a competition for over 12 months can no longer be considered active. And there are very few places (and I limit myself here to places where there is a cubing community) where there are not at least 1 competition a year.


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## Dene (May 7, 2014)

hcfong said:


> That's not my point. My point is that someone who hasn't been to a competition for over 12 months can no longer be considered active. And there are very few places (and I limit myself here to places where there is a cubing community) where there are not at least 1 competition a year.



I'm trying to stay out of this discussion in general, but there are many reasons why one might not attend a competition for more than a year. For example, in New Zealand things have been quiet competition-wise for a few years now, and if you live in Christchurch, and the only competition is in Auckland, that's a few hundred dollars and a significant inconvenience to get there. And what if you're busy that weekend? It's not an unrealistic situation, as most people probably end up with plans at least one weekend a month, if not a lot more. Also, it's a lot harder for people that rely on their parents.

It's probably less obvious to you because you live in a tiny country with lots of competitions around. In a country like New Zealand or Australia it isn't so easy. I can't even imagine how difficult it is for some people in South America.


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## Carrot (May 7, 2014)

Dene said:


> I'm trying to stay out of this discussion in general, but there are many reasons why one might not attend a competition for more than a year. For example, in New Zealand things have been quiet competition-wise for a few years now, and if you live in Christchurch, and the only competition is in Auckland, that's a few hundred dollars and a significant inconvenience to get there. And what if you're busy that weekend? It's not an unrealistic situation, as most people probably end up with plans at least one weekend a month, if not a lot more. Also, it's a lot harder for people that rely on their parents.
> 
> It's probably less obvious to you because you live in a tiny country with lots of competitions around. In a country like New Zealand or Australia it isn't so easy. I can't even imagine how difficult it is for some people in South America.



but if you didn't attend a comp in 1 year you are no longer comp active. Yes it's not nice for some people that they can't be considered comp active, but on the other hand, would you want people who doesn't have recent competition experience to set the rules? regulations keeps changing slightly, same does competition procedures, therefore it only makes sense to let people with somewhat recent experience take the final decisions. 

And let's say you are have lots of experience, but you are no longer considered comp active, then the active people would most likely still listen to your good points and get influenced by your good points.. (in other words, you are still voting without actually placing a vote.)


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## AvGalen (May 7, 2014)

hcfong said:


> ...I believe this idea has a number of advantages:
> - By maintaining the voting body locally, it will result in less work for the WCA.
> ...
> - By organising it locally, the members of the voting body are much closer to the community the represent, than when they are selected by the WCA as a whole.
> ...


I think this would actually be a lot of work for the WCA. First they have to define regions, than appoint a regional maintainer, and than combine the information from all the regional maintainers. What you want would be a simple query on the WCA database
And I wouldn't want to represent the Dutch community for example. I always try to represent the entire community, even if it would be negative for me personally.


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## hcfong (May 7, 2014)

AvGalen said:


> I think this would actually be a lot of work for the WCA. First they have to define regions, than appoint a regional maintainer, and than combine the information from all the regional maintainers. What you want would be a simple query on the WCA database
> And I wouldn't want to represent the Dutch community for example. I always try to represent the entire community, even if it would be negative for me personally.



The WCA has already defined regions for senior delegates (https://www.worldcubeassociation.org/delegates) and I think this regional division could work fine for this purpose.
The senior delegate of that region will be responsible for appointing a maintainer for that region.

A simply query on the WCA database is fine, but I think we need to allow for regional discretion when deciding who is eligible. A universal set of criteria, such as the one you proposed earlier, has the problem that it doesn't apply to regions where there aren't as many competitions as there are here. Here, we are in the fortunate position to have a competition within a few hours travel pretty much every month, but as Dene says, that's the the case everywhere.

I'm all for a single universal voting system, and I think a simple query on the WCA database would do the trick, but selecting the voters and maintaining a voting body, should be a regional matter, with only minimal interference from the WCA, who will only set as few as possible essential requirements. It's up to the regions to decide what criteria they use to meet those requirements.


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