78
$\begingroup$

The 2013 elections are over, and it's time to congratulate the winners, our new moderators:

Arthur Fischer Michael Greinecker
Alex Becker Alexander Gruber

Good luck in your new positions, and may the force be with you!

In the same breath, I wish to thank again the leaving moderators, Zev Chonoles, Qiaochu Yuan, and Eric Naslund. Thank you for all the hard work that you've put into the site!

For details on how the voting played out, you can download the election results here, or view a summary report online.

$\endgroup$
25
  • $\begingroup$ The winners come from the analysis of the .blt file with OpenSTV. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 20:09
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Congratulations to the winners, and thanks for volunteering to help! Out of curiosity Asaf, which "ballot cleaning", "precision", and "threshold" did you use? (The relevant meta.SO page doesn't appear to specify.) $\endgroup$
    – Zev Chonoles
    May 21, 2013 at 20:14
  • 14
    $\begingroup$ Yes, good luck to them. I'll raise my next glass of wine to their success and to the leaving moderators. But with moderation. $\endgroup$
    – Julien
    May 21, 2013 at 20:14
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @MadScientist: I'm sure the defaults are fine; I really have no idea what those options do. But on the off-chance that it does matter in some future election, it seems like it would be worth specifying what options are being used to calculate the official results. $\endgroup$
    – Zev Chonoles
    May 21, 2013 at 20:22
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ @user17762: I admit that I actually prepared a list of the candidates (whom I believed had a chance of winning, so about the top six from the primaries) and removed the extra names when I had the results. I prepared the list with the order the election page at the time (which is random). $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 20:52
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @Shog: Thanks for editing the final results in! $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 21:29
  • 10
    $\begingroup$ Hopefully this "congratulations to the winners" won't be like "congratulations for being scre...I mean, elected as the Mathematics Dept. Head. Now please begin to sign stuff, go to meetings with the university's big bosses, hear crying students, do almost zero mathematics, fight with the secretary, the copy boy, the guy who must fix the coffee machines....". So congratulations and have a riot! I'll say my three candidates were elected...:) $\endgroup$
    – DonAntonio
    May 21, 2013 at 23:02
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @DonAntonio Lol at ...,do almost zero mathematics, fight with the secretary, the copy boy, the guy who must fix the coffee machines... $\endgroup$
    – user17762
    May 21, 2013 at 23:38
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ It's in order by number of bronze badges, sorted ascending. $\endgroup$
    – GeoffDS
    May 22, 2013 at 1:49
  • 36
    $\begingroup$ I hope next time the rule that a moderator (or moderater ?) is necessarily someone whose name ends with -er will be changed to something more sensible. Like ending with -jg. $\endgroup$
    – Georges Elencwajg
    May 22, 2013 at 19:35
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @Georges: I think that you'd be the only elected moderator in that case... ;-) $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 22, 2013 at 19:37
  • 2
    $\begingroup$ @Asaf Karagilajg: really? $\endgroup$
    – Georges Elencwajg
    May 22, 2013 at 19:39
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Georges Elencwaer: Yes! :-) $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 22, 2013 at 19:47
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ Conguratulations!! I wish you have a good work in the new period. Thanks to the previous modarators for their valuable contributions. $\endgroup$
    – Seyhmus Güngören
    May 23, 2013 at 16:12
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ @Georges, I will support your bid for being moderatjg in the next election. :) $\endgroup$
    – J. M. ain't a mathematician
    May 29, 2013 at 18:42

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
22
$\begingroup$

Here is the result for those who do not have immediate access to OpenSTV. The candidates are elected using OpenSTV with the Meek STV method. More details on stackexchange moderator election vote counting can be found here.

Congrats to the newly elected moderators! I believe these four will do a great job and take the community forward. I hope the other candidates will keep contributing to math.stackexchange and wish them better luck in the next elections.

$\endgroup$
20
  • 11
    $\begingroup$ I have to admit that I am quite dissatisfied with the number of users who voted this year. We have twice the users who can vote, and like last year half of them visited the site (and could have voted then, and this is also twice the amount of last year). And nearly three times more users visited the election page! But only 40 users actually voted. That's a shame. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 21:17
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ No, only increase of 40 from last year. All the other numbers grew by a factor of roughly 2, and this grow up by a very disappointing factor of 1.1 $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 21:28
  • 15
    $\begingroup$ Disappointing indeed - after all you earn a silver badge by voting! Where in real life do you have that? $\endgroup$
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    May 21, 2013 at 21:38
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Asaf: FWIW, there were 251 users who voted at least once in the primary phase but not in the final election phase. This can be one of the down-sides of running a primary. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    May 21, 2013 at 21:48
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ @Shog9 Were there users who did not vote in the primary but voted in the actual elections? $\endgroup$
    – user17762
    May 21, 2013 at 21:49
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ Read the rest of the comments, @HSN. Way more than 40 voted. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    May 21, 2013 at 22:05
  • 9
    $\begingroup$ @Shog9 During the earlier elections, I remember that there used to be a small line (an eye catcher) at the top of the math.stackexchange main page asking people to vote. I thought that was a good idea. Probably, in the future elections, we should have this to encourage/remind people to vote. $\endgroup$
    – user17762
    May 21, 2013 at 22:10
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ We've moved away from using that for anything short of critical messages (the site is going down, etc.) @user17762. That said, anyone eligible to vote did get a notification at each stage of voting - the problem is almost certainly that a lot of folks don't realize they're able to vote twice. $\endgroup$
    – Shog9
    May 21, 2013 at 22:12
  • 11
    $\begingroup$ @Shog9: I agree with user17762 on this. The banner was helpful. It made it clear that something is going on. I was talking to a friend two days ago, and I asked him if he voted and he didn't even know the elections were on (despite visiting the site several times during the election period). He didn't care enough to vote, but the point is that he didn't even know that it's going on. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    May 21, 2013 at 22:17
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ Moreover, the notifications are pretty hard to notice. Silver on white background... $\endgroup$
    – Martin
    May 21, 2013 at 22:22
  • 14
    $\begingroup$ If moderators are critical for the site then voting for moderators should also be critical for the site. Should a banner of some sort mean that for a week or two people see one less top question when they come to the site then that is the heavy burden we should pay for the right to vote. $\endgroup$
    – Jay
    May 21, 2013 at 23:17
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ The voter turnout doesn't bother me, but maybe I am missing something. In particular, if some people really didn't vote because they didn't know that the primary election wasn't the actual election, when there was a written description available making it clear, I am not bothered that those people didn't vote. Many people get use out of the site but don't want to put the time into thinking about moderators, and that seems fine to me. $\endgroup$
    – Jonas Meyer
    May 22, 2013 at 3:31
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ @Shog9 With such high numbers of primary-only voters I'm surprised that you still use them. With the STV voting system the primary isn't really needed, a few tweaks to the actual election would eliminate the need for any primaries. $\endgroup$
    – user9733
    May 22, 2013 at 5:47
  • 4
    $\begingroup$ @MadScientist There was a lively discussion about the need for a primary for this specific election as one potential way of avoiding issues which had arisen in previous elections. $\endgroup$
    – Mark Bennet
    May 22, 2013 at 7:32
  • 5
    $\begingroup$ @Shog9, I didn't see any notifications to vote. I just happened to notice the election in the "Events" slot in the sidebar. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Taylor
    May 22, 2013 at 8:41

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .