divabot

The Founding Meeting for the pan-Europe organisation Bi+ Europe saw almost everyone agree about almost everything. Yay! There's some legal work to do, but it should start up in April next year.

What were the main disagreements? There were five things that more than a couple of people voted against. Not in the order they were in the draft documents, they were...

Voting System ( Read more... )

Non-bi+ members of the board ( Read more... )

Extra vote ( Read more... )

Russia / Belarus ( Read more... )

Definition of bi+ ( Read more... )

Again, thanks to some very deft work during the entire process before and during the meeting, none of these led to shouting matches, and I don't think anyone went away going 'Well, that vote went the wrong way, I'm not going to take any further part...'

Thanks once again to Governance Leader Soudah, Governance Analyst Demet, and polishing sessions chair Darienne for that work.

1. I have done STV votes by hand in Student Union elections in the early 1980s. It is doable; you just don't want to have to do it, and it was the one reason I was glad that turnouts tended to be low in the elections in question.

2. In small elections, ties are rare in STV but can happen. In that case, it can make a difference how high you put someone even without the vote being 'transferred' because there are still people in the running above them. I once won a place on the Liberal Party's Federal Executive because I'd put the person I'd tied with third on my list of preferences, and they'd put me second.

3. Following the formation of a coalition government in the UK in 2010, there was a referendum on adopting AV. It's not a good way of electing a Parliament, but it's better than simple plurality, known in the UK as 'first past the post' even though the 'post' isn't fixed... It wasn't just most of the two largest parties campaigning against it that meant I knew it would lose, it was when the Electoral Commission published the booklet on it that went to everyone and managed to make 'put your choices in order and if your current preferred choice is last, we use your next one, until someone gets over 50% of the votes' so complicated that I could barely understand WTF they were saying.

Here, there was a tiny bit more detail on how STV works than I thought was strictly necessary, but I am not crying foul...

4. Note it doesn't matter what the second preference of the people who voted for 'one or two' is, or even if they had one or not: the outcome of 'none' vs 'minority' is not going to affect its two wins.

5. Five produced a (different) single clear winner and another produced a two-way tie. As well as simple plurality, AV, and Condorcet, there's the French Presidential style (if no-one gets a majority, the top two go into a runoff), Borda (you allot more points to people's first choices than their second etc and see who has the most overall), and approval voting, the one that produced the tie (you can vote for as many as you like, highest one wins). That last one was added by the later book, I think.

At some point, I'm absolutely going to put the table of votes and the various results on a t-shirt...

6. Well this one, anyway.

7. The only possible exception I can think of is Albania, whose horrific situation was more home-grown / China's. And we didn't have anyone saying they were from there.

Monday 20th October - time to work! ( Read more... )

Tuesday 21st October - more work! ( Read more... )

Wednesday 22nd October - finishing off ( Read more... )

Overall

Like I say, this was an astonishing example of international community building. Congratulations to all the organising team.

Having the amount of money they had helped: it meant a bunch of people got flights and/or accommodation and/or conference fees paid. How many, I'm not sure, but my guess would be somewhere between a third and a half.

It's not necessarily a model I'd want to follow, because without large grants 'gold plated' events are not sustainable and this was one of those. It was a catered hotel event - and hotels tend to go 'ker-ching!' when told you want to have a conference there because they're used to businesses that don't really care about the costs. I would never ever ever had considered having an official photographer, for example.¹¹ But this was Bi+ History being made and the results are very good to look at.

It was also the least fluffy bi conference I think I've ever been to, but that's entirely OK: it was clear from the first mention of it that this was a work event much more than a social one, and attendees were picked according to what they could contribute rather than 'anyone and everyone' or 'first come' basis. And that definitely worked.

I'm already looking forward to the next one.

Oh, since more or less finishing this, I see that the two people who led the governance process have published their version. It's great, and I'm not just saying that because there's a flattering picture of me in the middle of it :)

1. I'd thought the reason they're part of ILGA Europe etc is around safety, but it turns out that they'd prefer to be part of 'European' organisations rather than 'pan-Asian' ones.

2. An obscenely low £61, a quid over twice the cost of the train to and from the airport.

3. Just over £370, but mostly because I had eight nights in Vilnius rather than three and at one point, the plan was for L to come too. Staying at the hotel effectively cost €290 in a single room for four nights, so more per night than I paid. There was also the option to share for €40/night.

4. €250, or about £220.

5. In the end, I spent around £95 during my time there.

6. It 'obviously' couldn't have been both: with one normal meeting a year, you'd almost always be within six months of the previous or the next one.

7. This is how we realised the published programme was wrong - when registering, there was a form for signing up for this walk on Monday or Tuesday. I was about to go for Tuesday anyway when one of the people on the desk mentioned that I had no choice because of when my session was scheduled. "No it's not, it's in the first afternoon slot, look..." "Ah."

8. I do wonder if I was the only person to go 'that's 25% non-bi+ identified...' I should also note that I'm presenting this in a slightly different way: the text was around having all or a majority of people being bi+ identified, but this is the way the discussion in the session was actually framed.

9. I tried doing some typing on governance lead Soudah's laptop with a French keyboard but gave up. Having a few of the letters change position wasn't a problem, but what sort of keyboard has a key that has both full stop and semi colon on, but makes you press shift for the one everyone uses the most? :) :) More seriously, given that English was most people's second, third, fourth, fifth, or sixth language, the other way I felt a minority there was in my monolingualism.

10. There was a noise warning, but I'd have moved away to avoid the smell if I'd realised what the noise warning was about: the smell of these really irritates my nose. Fortunately, this one wasn't too bad.

11. Even before he was occasionally irritating! Presumably being more used to doing weddings, he wandered around coming into sessions, walking around the room one way or another taking photos from various angles of various people, then leaving and coming back later to repeat that. Had he come to my one, I'd have been very tempted to tell him he had two minutes and that was it. In the end, he went with the first of the walking tours and, as mentioned, the results are great to see.