Ae, I think we're iterating towards the same position from opposite starting points. Loomio's original interface traditionally worked by "tying polls tightly to a meta-discussion via a comment thread", and a major design decision has been made to move away from that. We all agree (I think) that being able to associate a poll with A discussion area is good, but also that it doesn't have to be a comment thread on Loomio. With the polls becoming more "much more granular", as @robertguthrie puts it, it opens up possibilities for integrating them into other platforms that folks like @bobhaugen have been asking for #UXWin !
EDIT: formatting

Hello! I missed the boat with this one... Approval voting has been mentioned and scored fairly high in the poll. Approval voting is a sub-type of score voting (a.k.a. rating.) In approval voting you rate using two 'levels', in score voting you rate with 3 or more levels.

Rating methods such as approval/score (cardinal systems) have a lot of theoretical and practical benefits over ranking methods such as Condorect/Coombs/Hare/Borda/etc (ordinal systems) in terms of actually identifying what people want.

Very interested to hear if score voting is in the pipeline and if not, happy to advocate further! :sweat_smile: For further info on this subject do check out this amazing email list for ongoing discourse about Social Choice theory and this informed but opinionated website about Score Voting.

On a side note, during the last few months in France, a recent voting method is being very positively discussed: it's called Majority Judgment. I am curious what you guys think about it :)

Wow thanks for that email list link Doug! - I just had a look and just found out that PAV had already been invented/theorised about a decade before I even began to come up with it myself - it is really awesome to know that PAV academia already came into existence (about 10 years) before I invented/coined the exact same theory of PAV in my own informal intellectual ramblings seen here: https://www.loomio.org/d/zgYdEaFp/internet-party-democracy

I understand that PAV, which combines both Approval and Preferential/Condorcet voting, is the most optimally inclusive method to achieve a voter convergence outcome.
When openly electing from the group member base it also produces new organic data about where social edges/bonds exist within a group, and which members already naturally tend to serve as central points of group cohesion for a given type of member function (i.e. the responsibilities of the role that is up for election).

Hi Quentin. Majority Judgement looks pretty good: it's a score voting system with some additional features. I recall reading somewhere that the authors found good reasons to use verbal indicators instead of numeric indicators...

Glad you find it useful! Don't get dragged in though... some of those conversations are a bit mind-warping. I would be very interested to test out a proportional approval or score voting app. For me I'm still mostly concerned with single-winner methods.