On Saturday, October 8, 2016 at 7:16:44 PM UTC+2, Tango Eight wrote:

I'm not opposed to this. But there someone has to publish a lot of background info so that well informed choices can be made. Sean, bless his heart, isn't dong a very good job of that right now (because with him what isn't personal is some dark conspiracy), so maybe *you* can give it a try.


That is an important point. If we are going to ask people to voice an opinion on something with all kinds complexities and non-obvious implications, we will need to adequately specify the question(s) or the answers will be the proverbial "garbage in - garbage out". That's not a trivial task. The RC agonizes over how to ask questions for issues that are on people's minds in a way that avoids uninformed feedback as much as possible. Sometimes we succeed at it.

Having just gone through the task of figuring out how to poll on a far, far simpler set of questions on US rules complexity this year and having tried, personally, to start a side-by-side "FAI to US" rules comparison about a year ago I have come to the conclusion that just asking a hypothetical question (at minimum for anyone who hasn't flown both FAI and US rules) "Adopt FAI rules in the US - Y/N?" in a poll would do more harm than good. It would be used as a bludgeon by the proponents of the response with more votes and attacked as a "clearly biased" or "inadequate" question by proponents of the response with fewer votes, so hip-shooting a poll question is, IMHO, a terrible idea. It'll take some further work to figure out what question(s) might be useful and constructive - starting with a clear description of the "proposal" and at least some factual analysis of the most important differences and their implications - like this year's "rules complexity" questions, with considerably more explanation of issues and implications. Then we might get a somewhat more informed read.

Or we can just have a food fight about it.

I fully expect this topic to come up at the November RC meeting.

9B