Yes, polling, essentially. I want to be able to quantify people's responses so I know quickly and easily how many people think X is the best option, out of Y options and Z members. I think that would be useful, because it's hard to get a sense for how many people have which preferences out of a discussion thread. And in this case there's polling and the option to discuss the polls as well, so I don't think anything's lost.
I don't think Yahoo is an ideal format, but it's what's freely available to me allowing both polling and discussions, and I hope people don't have a problem using it.
I should stress that although I'll report gathered poll data back to the rest of Barbelith in this thread (which I've just decided), obviously nothing binding can come out of this. Please, no one pretend that I mean this group to represent the whole of Barbelith, I'm aware it's only a subset. Worse, it's a subset of Barbelith that wants change and is familiar with and comfortable with Yahoo Groups, which is likely to skew things. But from this I do hope to get an idea of how many people want to see which changes made, how many want a new board started, and if so, what features are strongly preferred, so that if someone wants to start a new board they have some basis for deciding how to do that and what software to use. I would like to avoid having twenty to thirty disgruntled lithmembers go off and start twenty to thirty new boards with the expectation that all of barbelith will follow, only to find that the feature sets they've chosen are inadequate or unnecessary, the social issues haven't been addressed, and the community becomes fragmented due to the lack of coordination. I think this might help address a few of those possibilities. |
