I have created two polls since I obtained my 100,000th Gridcoin a few weeks ago, and I've learned one fundamental truth about Gridcoin polls.....
We need to create a "Poll Etiquette" document for actionable Gridcoin polls, and the community should weigh in on this.
My polls had the distinction of being the first polls after a prolonged period without any polls due to various issues/kinks that were being worked out with the blockchain poll system and as a result, I received a lot of feedback on them. Various users pointed me to various partial forum threads and Steemit posts which all contained very little input and some basic preferences listed out by a handful of individual users.
The question I continued to ask that went unanswered was: If Gridcoin is decentralized, without any community agreed-upon poll procedures, couldn't the results of any poll be invalidated? I was being told "your poll should include 'x' or 'y' otherwise it's invalid." Well how can that be, if the community has never agreed at least to a formalized poll etiquette document or some basic rules/parameters?
I'm trying to solve that problem by creating a series of polls to inform a "Poll Etiquette" document I'm putting together. I wouldn't refer to these as hard and fast "rules" necessarily, but at least something we can point to and say that the Gridcoin community has agreed to these items.
You can read more about it in my GitHub issue on the matter.
Keep in mind, this is not intended to invalidate any current or previous poll. It is meant to inform users creating future polls.
First up is a simple one: Should there be an "Abstain" option for every future actionable poll?
I will reference this CryptoCoinTalk post/discussion when I create the poll in a few hours. Anyone is free to hop into that forum thread and add any dialogue you want the voters to see on the subject.
For this first poll (and presumably all future polls in this series, dependent on the results of previous polls) I will use a 14-day voting period, a voting weight based on Balance+Magnitude, and I will include an "Abstain" option. These are all basic poll parameters that seem to have been accepted for previous polls.
I hope you will help me out by contributing to discussion on these issues and, of course, voting in the polls. I will open every poll idea for discussion before I put the poll up. The discussion taking place before the poll is launched allows you to provide input on how the question is worded, the information that the reference link contains, as well as whether the proposed question is even appropriate for this poll etiquette document.
Thanks for reading. Keep crunching!