The new name of this group is ...
... exactly the same as the old name.
Yep, "lgbt" won the vote from this thread. That may not be a surprise to many people, but this has still been a worthwhile process to go through. There were some concerns expressed about the name, and it was only fair that we gave everyone a chance to have a say.
Of course, not everyone will be happy with this outcome. I saw a variety of voting responses which made that clear. At one extreme, I saw a couple of responses with "lgbt" marked as #1, and all other names marked as #N/A. At the other extreme, I saw a couple of responses with the other seven names ranked from #1 to #7, and "lgbt" marked as #N/A. Someone else marked any name which even included as "lgbt" as #N/A. So, there are definitely strong opinions for and against "lgbt".
But the vote was convincing. Nearly half of all people (43 out of 87) put "lgbt" as their first choice, two-thirds of people had it as their 1st or 2nd choice, and more than three-quarters of people had it as their 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. As I checked the results occasionally throughout the period of voting, "lgbt" consistently had about 50% of the first choices. And, counting all the ranked votes, "lgbt" got a final score of 6.98 out of a theoretical maximum of 8. The next closest names - "lgbtq" and "lgbtplus" - were scored at about 5.5 out of 8.
Here is the published result on Survey Monkey, and a screenshot of the detailed count.
I'm the one who asked Deimos to make ~lgbt. I opted for ~lgbt for pretty much the reasons @alyaza outlined in the previous thread. I was going for the general non-exclusive usage "lgbt" gets these days, rather than anything TERFy.
LGBTQ would have been fine (it has a pretty pervasive use in the media and is also very general), but I'm very happy we didn't go with ~rainbow. 🏳️🌈 has a pretty strong correlation with gay men. The trans (and to a lesser degree lesbian) flags are so popular for a reason, and they aren't rainbows. Not to mention rainbow capitalism.
I'm happy with the outcome 🙂
Can't say I'm surprised... but oddly enough, now that we have the results, I actually find myself somewhat disappointed with them despite the fact that I too ranked ~lgbt first and some of the LGBT variants after it.
I'm curious to know the crossover support between ~lgbt and ~lgbtq/~lgbtplus (I imagine quite high), and if anyone else who picked ~lgbt first, like myself, is actually similarly disappointed at the results, in retrospect. I think if I had to pick again I would probably bump ~lgbtplus up to first since I do think the argument for inclusiveness is a good one.
Ah well, c'est la vie. Perhaps we can revisit this again some time in the future.
edit: Just noticed, but the next closest names with 5.5 were ~lgbtq and ~lgbtplus according to the results, not "queer" or "rainbow", @Algernon_Asimov.
I'm disappointed, too, but for different reasons: I ranked "rainbow" first. However, I did put "lgbt" second, so I'm not too disappointed (which is the benefit of ranked voting rather than first past the post voting).
I've fixed this.
Thanks for the work putting this together, and especially setting it up in a nice way to let people express their preferences, instead of just a simple "choose one" poll.
I'm glad the current name seems like a good choice, but we can always think about it again in the future if the group grows a lot (or the terminology starts shifting).
Yeah, as an Aussie, I've been indoctrinated into preferential voting. :)
I'm new to Tildes and wasn't around for this, but I'd be interested to see what the result would have been if Instant Runoff Voting had been used (which is the actual vote counting method used in Australian single-winner races such as the House of Representatives and state Legislative Councils).
Sadly, I don't know of any online services that'll easily let you run an IRV vote, but the counting method is simple enough that it could be easily scripted with a CSV export from something like SurveyMonkey, provided the form was set up so that people couldn't give two candidates an equal preference.
(edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to argue the result here, just being a voting nerd!)
I can't export the data. I can read each individual response on-screen, but I can't download them. (That's a paid feature.)
I'm pretty sure the result would have turned out the same. Like I said in the post up there:
"lgbt" won hands-down, no matter what voting method we might have used.
Here's a transcribed version of the statistics (assuming I can remember how to do Markdown tables!):
here is what this looks like when you visualize it as stacked percentages, for those of you who can't contextualize the raw data here.
It wasn't my top choice, but I'm more than comfortable with respecting the outcome of the vote and am happy that we did this. I would have been fine with any of the suggested labels provided that's what the community decided. Thanks for spearheading the discussions and survey, @Algernon_Asimov!
Given that the group name is remaining the same, is there value to adding something to the group description that affirms that it's inclusive? I don't want to start another whole cycle of discussion and debate, but I think a single sentence or two identifying that the group is open to all identities might be a useful thing to add. Thoughts?
Yeah, looking back at the discussion thread and seeing
right at the top does make me think...~lgbt's description doesn't make it clear if it includes people who aren't lgbt! Maybe it seems a little silly to push for but there's much less room for claims about usability and being easily understood when it comes to a description. Seems like an obvious good thing to do.
Seeing as @Deimos is the only person who can actually change group descriptions, it's up to him.
What would you suggest as an alternative description? (Personally, I don't see a need to change, so I have nothing to suggest.)
I thought a bit about how to word something, and it's genuinely difficult to do and not fall back on either catch-all terms or a lengthy initialism, both of which we just voted down in our referendum. This is the best I have so far:
I don't love it, but it's the least clumsy thing I came up with in my brainstorming. If anyone else has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
I will also say that I think it's far more important that we create and foster an inclusive community through the type of content that's posted and the comments we make. The submissions to ~lgbt have far more visibility than its description. This means that the obligatory signposting, while nice to have, is probably of lesser importance than what we post. As such, I'm fine with leaving it as is if we can't think of something good.
I updated it to that so I don't forget to do it later, but I can easily change it again if you or anyone else comes up with any other ideas. It can certainly be longer too, if you want to add some more sentences going into detail, it doesn't have to be as short as it is now. Thanks for thinking about it!
No problem. We'll see if anyone can come up with better wording than mine. Thanks for your support!
How about:
Firstly, I would tidy up the wording. It doesn't flow. (Is English a second language for you?)
Secondly, I think it's a bit wordy. I would streamline the middle sentence:
I like this much more than my suggestion and think it's great! I support changing the group description to this.
Thanks for the suggestion, @Tuna, and for the editing, @Algernon_Asimov.
Much better.
You're right about english being my second language, i noticed that there was something weird about my sentence, but I couldn't pinpoint it.
Your sentence was correct, but it was too artificial and formal. Ironically, it was too well written!
Haha, I'll keep that in mind. Thanks for the feedback.
Argh, frustrating. As much as I didn't expect my top choices to win, I was hoping we could at least get ~lgbtq or a similar inoffensive middle ground out this. That's too bad.
Thanks for running the poll, Algernon.