From the discussion, I guess we can conclude that the above statement is false. Maybe we should play with polls a little before dealing with issues that might be contentious.
As background, Discourse has an easy to use poll tool which was disabled in their software releases when we first installed it. Now it seems that it has been reenabled.
I’d love to have had this available when we were looking to find a replacement for our 45W Hastings location. I did a bunch of SurveyMonkey polls, and they were a pain to set up and manage. I feel the data was useful, although since I was the only person who could directly see the results I was a little uncomfortable with the process.
@tdwebste - I don’t have root on the VHS Talk server. As you do, I trust you not to create polls and then stuff the database from the backend, I don’t see the threat as being that extreme that we have to limit use of the feature to entertainment purposes only. But yeah, maybe we want to get into non-entertainment polls a little slowly, if only to get used to how they work.
That’s a valid concern if you’re dealing with small samples and large populations. It doesn’t apply when you’re working with a small number of people, each of whom can express a preference by clicking a radio button on a web page. If someone don’t make the effort to participate in a given poll, I think it’s fair to conclude that they’re just not that concerned about the question at hand. (Assuming the question and options presented are reasonably worded, which is a big assumption.)
Okay, so VHS general meetings draw a small self-selecting group of members. I guess we can conclude that those are only good for entertainment purposes, and no decisions should be made there either?
I’m not advocating we run the organization off of VHS Talk polls. But claiming they’re useful for “entertainment purposes only” right out of the gate seems a bit overdone.