UKC

Maybe I am going delirious with lockdown but i was on 2 zoom meetings organised through the BMC this week and was so impressed with the volunteers organising them. The first was on fixed gear in North Wales and the second was the London area meeting. I really appreciate the amount of time and effort that the volunteers put into what is often really boring detail, 2 day meeting on articles of association, organising youth comps etc because i would never do this stuff.

The fixed gear debate was great and i even changed my mind which i think is always a win.

Thanks to everyone who does this type of work, you are great!

mike

I thought Tim Jepson did a great job of chairing the fixed gear meeting.

Funnily enough I think my own view on the matter changed throughout the course of the original thread, leading to what I said (and sorry I said so much) during the meeting itself. 

Whilst I may not have agreed with the viewpoint set out from the other side, I thought it was quite unifying to see how much people cared about Gogarth (in particular) - even if we had differing solutions to the matter at hand. 

All that aside, I can second what your original post is all about - BMC volunteers deserve a knighthood for all their good work.

Is there a summary of the fixed gear meeting as I was unable to attend? 

The Open Forum last night was good too (although I felt a bit ambushed by the introduction of the idea of Consecutively Halved Positional Voting partway through the meeting).

The honesty of not having the expertise in house was good, I would just encourage to seek it out rather than trying to simplify things (namely STV) without fully understanding them.

Edit: Having spent my lunchtime reading about surplus votes I am also baffled!

I've just sent the Chair a message to see and will post an update as soon as I've heard back.

Mike, I've also passed on your compliments too, as I'm sure he'll be grateful for the feedback.

Oh that would be great. As this is a post for compliments i was impressed with your attitude; that you are reconciled to not doing some routes you would like to do because the means (glueing in pegs/bolts) do not justify the ends. I thought that is right, in my case i have really wanted to  do Slanting Slab on Cloggy but can't justify trying to climb the start free (loose. horrible fall and too hard anyway) but now i think better not to do it than replacing the rusted out peg with the equivalent of a bolt. I thought the exception is where the bolt is justified on grounds greater than climbing, so now i would support replacement fixed gear at the top of The Strand because it protects a valuable bit of nature (is it really part of an SSI?).

Anyway please do pass on my compliments and thanks to Tim.

mike

Pretty much all modern STV voting involves a quota system. Surplus votes are not so complex once you get used to them but the election does need several stages which makes it a bit slow to process on a live election, like the BMC run.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

I was involved in a 3 person 2 seat election with the simple eliminate STV election and it nearly caused legal action, so I'd strongly advise the BMC don't use that. In the end the institution exceptionally made an extra post for a term (and in future hired a company to do the work using proper STV). I've also been involved with a tens of candidates on nearly ten seat election with multiple reserved categories. The STV results sheet is a sight to behold.

I read through the Wikipedia article at lunchtime. I understand the ideas of a quota.

Issues with Simple Eliminite STV were raised and I am pretty confident that theBMC won't be using it due to the potential for the problems you've cited, what WILL be used is what seems to be up in the air still.

Just got the following back from Tim Jepson:

There isn't an actual recording of the Fixed Gear debate, but the I'll be producing his summary for presentation at the next North Wales area meeting (2nd March). That report will include the results of the indicative polls which were run during the debate.

He seems quite happy to make the poll results, and his report, publicly available, but I suspect you'll have to tune into tomorrow's meeting to get the full lowdown.

Hope that's of help.