VFM Networking Party

I hosted a party March 16 for people interested in voter-funded media at UBC, SFU, BCIT, Langara College etc. We can learn from implementing VFM in different ways at different student unions. Media groups can build their brand reputations by linking across schools in various ways: publicizing and reviewing each other’s quality, guest posting, and eventually creating groups that serve multiple democratic communities. The next step for VFM may be municipal politics, which broader coalitions of students and graduates could tackle.

Meanwhile we can eat, drink, chat and relax! Thanks to SFU Instant Blog’s Patrick Lee for this video and review of the party...

… and to UBC Insiders’ Gerald Deo for these photos. Here’s a list of media folks who attended, with links to their blogs & photos:

School/Org	Blog/Site	Name/PhotoLink	Notes
BCIT	BCIT PCMA	Joseph Landicho	In centre of photo
BCIT	BCIT PCMA	Kris De Luna	On left of photo
CBC		Diana Filer	TV & radio programming; now retired
Langara	LSU	Arran Walshe
Langara	LSU	Chris Vincent
Langara	VG's LSU Blog	Vincent Gornall
SFU	Instant Blog	Patrick Lee	In centre of photo
SFU	SFU Politics	Xenia Menzies
SFU	SFU VFM	Brad Coleman
UBC	AMS	Matthew Naylor	2 years on VFM planning committee
UBC	AMS	Stephanie Ryan	2 years on VFM planning committee
UBC	Devil's Advocate	Aaron Palm
UBC	Devil's Advocate	Eoin O'Dwyer	"Eoin" pronounced like "Owen"
UBC	Devil's Advocate	Stephen McCarthy
UBC	Election Erection	Kate Webb	Now a reporter at The Province
UBC	UBC Insiders	Gerald Deo	Took photos of this event
UBC	UBC Insiders	Maayan Kreitzman

Let me know if you’d like to attend the next VFM event, whenever that may be…

Year-Round Voter-Funded Media Competition Launched at UBC

Today we are launching the first round of this ongoing VFM competition. Entry period is from now through March 25. Voting will run from March 26 through April 30. Award pool $750: 1st prize $250, 2nd $200, 3rd $150, 4th $100, 5th $50. Entry fee $10. Full details and entry form at www.votermedia.org/ubc.

UBC students can now register to vote by emailing their campus-wide login ID to me (email address: ubc[at]votermedia.org). Once registered, log in at www.vista.ubc.ca and click on the VoterMedia Workshop.

We hope this competition will support a diversity of insight on issues important to UBC students, including AMS voting decisions like the upcoming referenda (March 25-31).

Year-Round VFM Approved for UBC

UBC's AMS Council has voted (March 12) to OK the launch of a year-round VFM system, subject to oversight of the Turbo-Democracy Committee. I will fund and administer it. We'll finalize plans and get it going ASAP.

Current proposed design is posted at www.votermedia.org/ubc. I’ll post developments there and in this blog, probably by Friday. I’m now proposing an entry fee of $10.

UBC students can register to vote (on a test ballot only for now), by emailing their campus-wide login ID to me (email: ubc[at]votermedia.org).

Alexis de Tocqueville biography by Hugh Brogan

French lawyer/politician Alexis de Tocqueville spent 10 months in the USA in 1831-1832 (when he was 26), then wrote his famous book Democracy in America. I’m now enjoying a new (2006) biography of Tocqueville by Hugh Brogan; from page 271:

“… what he had seen in America had convinced him that the prudent and gradual introduction of democratic institutions, which in this way would become part of the habits and opinions of the people … was a real possibility, and he was to spend the rest of his life advocating it; but he could not pretend that he was offering anything more than a hope. And although he would exert his considerable powers of persuasion to convert his readers to that hope, he was well aware that ultimate success or failure lay predominantly with forces outside his control. The convictions, passions and interests that divided France were not going to yield immediately to sweet reason. Hence Tocqueville’s doctrine was for long more honoured in Britain and the United States, where it was not particularly needed (being a rationalization of their actual history and politics) than in France, where it was.
But he never quite gave up hope.”

Then Brogan quotes from Democracy in America:

“It is difficult to induce the people to take part in government; it is still more difficult to supply them with the experience and the beliefs which they lack, but need in order to govern well. The democratic will is volatile; its agents, vulgar; its laws, imperfect. I admit all this.”

I’m looking forward to reading about Tocqueville’s career as a democratic reformer, after publication of his book.

UBC Year-Round VFM Design

I put this on the web at www.votermedia.org/ubc today:

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I invite you to help me (Mark Latham) plan a new VFM system for UBC, that would let students vote funds to media year-round, not just at election time. My proposal is outlined below. You can give me advice on how to improve it by commenting in the VoterMedia blog.

I'll wait for an OK from AMS Council before launching this. I hope UBC students will grow to like this system enough to fund it themselves, and take over running it. To get it started, I'm offering to fund and administer it.

How to Vote: Email your UBC campus-wide login ID to me (email address: ubc[at]votermedia.org), wait a few days for processing, then log in at www.vista.ubc.ca. Click on the VoterMedia workshop. Please join now to help test the system!

Contest Schedule: My basic idea is to have monthly awards, but it may be too much to ask students to vote every month. And in summer maybe contest periods should be longer. If we can start by then, I suggest the first contest period to start March 24 (coinciding with referenda voting) and end April 30.

Voters: UBC students. (How about including faculty and staff?)

(Media) Contestants: Open to any person, group or organization, whether affiliated with UBC or not.

Awards: May vary from one contest period to the next. My proposal for March 24 - April 30: $750 total -- 1st prize $250, 2nd $200, 3rd $150, 4th $100, 5th $50.

Contest Entry Fee: I guess an ideal number of contestants is about 10, so would adjust the entry fee to aim for that. For the proposed March 24 - April 30 contest, let me know (email: ubc[at]votermedia.org) if you would enter if the entry fee is waived for entrants with websites showing the contest name and a prominent link to this page. If I get no more than 10 replies, then they will get that waiver. If more than 10, maybe we'll make it $10 or $20 (and ask who still wants to enter).

Voting Format: Many designs are possible, but based on extensive discussions with UBC VFM committees, I suggest trying preferential voting. You rank all the media, specifying your 1st choice contestant, 2nd choice contestant etc.

Vote Aggregation Method: Condorcet methods have desirable properties. Free software OpenSTV can handle it. I suggest using its Condorcet option to find the first place winner, then have it ignore that contestant and find the second place winner, etc.

Judging Criteria: Voters are free to evaluate media contestants any way they choose. Media contestants are free to appeal to voters (or not) any way they choose (of course subject to the laws of the land, like libel, copyright, pornography etc.).
====================

I would appreciate advice on any aspects of this project, especially these topics:

1. Voter registration:
It’s cumbersome to ask every voter to email me their campus-wide login ID, but it seems the only practical way for now. It’s technically feasible to add every UBC student to the VoterMedia workshop. But that’s a bit like spamming everyone, and would require some high-level UBC admin permission. If the UBC tech people would implement a self-enrollment option on Vista, that would solve the problem. But my tech admin contact says that probably won’t happen until 2009.

2. Contest schedule:
Is monthly too frequent?

3. Voting structure:
What do you think of preferential voting and a Condorcet method for aggregating?
Also, the ballot for ranking media doesn’t force you to rank them all, so:
- If you rank a contestant more than once, only its highest rank will be counted.
- Any contestants you don't rank will be counted as ranking below those you do rank. (So for example, if you only rank one contestant, it will be counted as ranking above all the others, even if you put it in the lowest rank.)
Any thoughts on this?

4. Awards:
Is five too few?

5. Entry fee:
Is this the best way to manage the number of entrants?

SFU VFM March awards increased to $600

Since March will be such an important month for media at SFU (election & referendum happening), I’ve decided to increase the VFM contest award pool to $600:

1st prize $200
2nd $160
3rd $120
4th $80
5th $40

If you’d like to enter, the form is linked at www.votermedia.org/sfu. Looking forward to some insightful content!

UBC VFM Results

University of British Columbia’s student union (Alma Mater Society) recently completed their second voter-funded media contest. (Their first was a year ago.) Below are my impressions of the results.

Overall, VFM succeeded in making a positive contribution to this democratic community. In spite of the late launch of the election and the VFM contest, the media contestants dove into energetic analysis and discussion of the electoral candidates. This gave voters more intelligent insight to base their choices on than they could have achieved without this media help. Like last year, it also educated candidates about their prospective positions and responsibilities.

Unfortunately, voter turnout was lower than last year, in both the election and VFM voting. This was primarily because of the late launch, short campaign and voting periods, relative lack of advance publicity, and voting on VFM after the election instead of concurrently.

The long-term success of VFM requires a feedback loop from media to voters and back to media. We need voters to reward media that provide public benefit. While voter assessments of media quality will never be perfect, we can see a substantial maturing of those assessments from January 2007 to January 2008.

The prime example is UBC Insiders’ move from 7th place to 2nd place. Their excellent content was not widely appreciated in January 2007 because they were new and VFM itself was new. But their continued blogging throughout 2007 spread their reputation, and a growing number of students participated in their comment discussions. By January 2008, students seeking insight into electoral candidates knew where to look, and were not disappointed.

Voters have also learned to catch on faster to media quality: new-in-2008 contestant The Devil’s Advocate sprinted from nowhere to a 3rd place finish. However, their modest but astute conjecture is that much of the voters’ improved insight came from self-selection: only students who follow the media bothered to return to the polls for VFM voting after the election was over.

It’s hard to tell how changing the VFM voting system may have shaped the award allocations. In 2007 we used approval voting (very simple – like or dislike each contestant) but this year we used “Interpolated Consensus” (more complex – vote each contestant $0 or $500 or $1000 or $1500 or $2000). Besides the apparently more accurate assessments of media quality, this year’s awards show several positive features. The top three places are closely spaced, supporting healthy competition among media groups rather than dominance by one or two. They represent substantially differing political perspectives, showing that a “tyranny of the majority” is not marginalizing all minority views. Nonetheless, not everyone wins a prize. A few entrants that voters deemed not worthwhile did not recover their $150 entry fees. This discipline helps discourage a proliferation of weak entrants from cluttering VFM ballots.

Some contestants won awards without providing much election coverage. I think The 432 and The Underground have been blamed for this. But to me, VFM has never been only about election coverage. For both of the last 2 years at UBC, I wanted to launch VFM in September, to encourage media to cover AMS issues for 4 months (including the election) and then get rewarded for it in a January vote. This incentive can work even before VFM is formally launched. So those media groups that have been connecting with students all year have earned the extra support they get.

The mix of serious and humorous content is of course up to media and voters to choose as they wish.

I’m also glad to see that VFM has induced a healthy debate on the quality of competing media [read comments]. I hope the debate and the incentive to build reputation among voters will encourage a steady improvement in both new and established media.

I hope to offer a year-round monthly VFM contest at UBC soon, like the one we just started at SFU. This could solve several problems, including late start, high entry fee, over-emphasis on elections and slow media-voter feedback learning.

VFM is gaining momentum at other student unions, including BCIT, Langara College and McGill University. I’m giving a public talk at Kwantlen University College (Richmond) on February 20.

Various websites’ discussions of VFM are linked from www.votermedia.org/forum.