Thanks for sharing the results, and the detailed analysis, Lizka!
I would be curious to know:
How the results would look like if votes were weighted by karma (or the logarithm of karma).
More about who voted. For example, the distributions of karma and years since joining the EA Forum.
TL;DR: We ran a Donation Election in which 341 Forum users[1] voted on how we should allocate the Donation Election Fund ($34,856[2]).
So there were as many voters as 8 % (= 341/ā4443) of the monthly active EA Forum users in November. One could have voted quite quickly, so I wonder whether you have any thoughts on why participation was not higher.
I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but Iāll see what we can check safely.
Re: the number of voters: Iām not sure. I wish more people had voted, but itās generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; Iād include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, thereāll be more natural interest as this will be a more established āthingā).
Some reasons I expect people didnāt vote: people thought they were ~unqualified (I heard this worry and tried to push back on it here, but could probably do better in the future), they just werenāt interested (e.g. because they didnāt think this is relevant, or their favorite projects werenāt candidates) or didnāt have time, they just didnāt hear about the election, or they meant to do it and never got around to it.
I should also flag that a lot of monthly active Forum users are ~weekly users, I think, and I expect that those are significantly less likely to vote. You can see this chart from the Forum survey we ran a while back (Iām hoping to share a writeup on it soon), which sort of illustrates this (itās a bit iffy because (1) the Forum survey will overrepresent more frequent users ā although that arguably boosts my point, and (2) this question had an issue where people who use the Forum ~3 times a month donāt really have an obvious answer to give, but oh well):
We (Online Team) had some very casual internal forecasts on how many voters weād get. I had initially (late November) put 50% for getting to 400 voters (most other people on the team were lower), then went higher as we got closer to that goal, and lower again later when voting slowed down. (We also had forecasts for 200 and 100; I had started with 80% and 90% there.)
Thanks for sharing the results, and the detailed analysis, Lizka!
I would be curious to know:
How the results would look like if votes were weighted by karma (or the logarithm of karma).
More about who voted. For example, the distributions of karma and years since joining the EA Forum.
So there were as many voters as 8 % (= 341/ā4443) of the monthly active EA Forum users in November. One could have voted quite quickly, so I wonder whether you have any thoughts on why participation was not higher.
I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but Iāll see what we can check safely.
Re: the number of voters: Iām not sure. I wish more people had voted, but itās generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; Iād include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, thereāll be more natural interest as this will be a more established āthingā).
Some reasons I expect people didnāt vote: people thought they were ~unqualified (I heard this worry and tried to push back on it here, but could probably do better in the future), they just werenāt interested (e.g. because they didnāt think this is relevant, or their favorite projects werenāt candidates) or didnāt have time, they just didnāt hear about the election, or they meant to do it and never got around to it.
I should also flag that a lot of monthly active Forum users are ~weekly users, I think, and I expect that those are significantly less likely to vote. You can see this chart from the Forum survey we ran a while back (Iām hoping to share a writeup on it soon), which sort of illustrates this (itās a bit iffy because (1) the Forum survey will overrepresent more frequent users ā although that arguably boosts my point, and (2) this question had an issue where people who use the Forum ~3 times a month donāt really have an obvious answer to give, but oh well):
We (Online Team) had some very casual internal forecasts on how many voters weād get. I had initially (late November) put 50% for getting to 400 voters (most other people on the team were lower), then went higher as we got closer to that goal, and lower again later when voting slowed down. (We also had forecasts for 200 and 100; I had started with 80% and 90% there.)