I talked with Ryan Chen-Wing today about Feds. Eventually, I complained about having to choose between Muneeba Omar and Jeff Henry for VP Education. I compared the choice to choosing between Liam McHugh-Russell and Aaron Lee-Wudrick last year: both are competent pairs of candidates and their differences are mostly philosophical. I'd rather two competent executives with differing philosophies than one competent one and one schmuck.

So how could we get away from the problem of one winner for one position? If we keep the number of positions fixed (which we don't have to do), then we need to destroy the one-to-one mapping of a winner to one and only one position.

An example may illustrate the point most clearly.

There are 4 positions and 9 candidates. If candidates are not candidates for a particular position but only for a position, then electors choose both the candidate and the position on their ballots. In the current election, this would mean the following:

• I could assign Hamilton to President, Omar to Education, Henry to VPAF and Ma to VP Internal.
• I would only be able to assign as one candidate to one position. Essentially, this alternative system allows electors to decide who should do what.

There may be a few problems with this alternative system. A modification of this alternative would allow electors to choose the best 4 executives (using a ranked ballot) and have the winning candidates choose their positions amongst themselves. A further modification would do away with fixed positions altogether and create a prime minister and three ministers (we could continue to use the federal terms of president and vice-president), whose portfolios would be decided and divided up by the winning candidates, or by council.

Something to think about, anyway.

So I just listened to the Feds executive candidates media forum. The recording is fairly good -- kudos to those who arranged the sound recording. Hopefully, students will listen to the forum.

Here's my rundown on the performances:

VP Internal. Advantage: Taylor. He had a better plan for defusing tensions after the Finkelstein talk. His idea to get in students' faces, in person, is good. I like Anderson's enthusiasm for weblogs but that's all I remember about his talk.

President. Advantage: Hamilton. Wroe has decent ideas and she scores points with me for saying that she needs to think about something before she can give an answer. Ma has okay ideas, too, but they are a little pie-in-the-sky. Specifically, Feds should stay out of housing. They should build a great web site that handles housing in the area and interfaces with other housing sites (for co-op). Hamilton was the best of the three. He handled questions fairly well and proposed some interesting ideas. I like the idea of moving the Feds offices to Fed Hall but putting a grocery store in Aussie's is a bad idea. The space should be used by the bookstore for storage, and, during peak periods, for consignment and book look up only.

VP Admin & Finance. Advantage: Afzaal. Clelland loses because he thinks that providing jobs to students is a good service. There are thousands of jobs in Waterloo region and hundreds of jobs on campus. Feds is not an employment service. Too, Afzaal seemed like a reasonable guy.

VP Education. Advantage: Henry. Too bad Omar didn't make the forum. I think she's pretty damn good. But Henry is good too. I think he would work well with non-ticketmates. Plus it's good to have an engineer in the mix.

I'm currently voting for:

• Will Hamilton
• Raveel Afzaal
• Jeff Henry
• Brent Taylor

So Matt Goyer is trying to organize a UW blogger get together. I think it should be at the Grad House but he's suggesting McMullan's or Weaver's. I can't go to McMullan's or Weaver's cause McMullan banned RC-W from Weaver's for no good reason.

I wonder where that guy is. He's funny.

If you read uws, you should come to the uws term meeting and social today at 3:00 p.m. at 379 Erb Street W, Unit 2. The meeting should only last 30 minutes or so.

Matt Goyer is an effective blogger and his proposal for blogging at UW is good. He should submit it as an op-ed to Imprint.

Feds has created a new mailing list, called fedsnews. It's a start. But it should be called feds-announce (note the hyphen). News is too restrictive.

UW computer science Professor Prabhakar Ragde has posted version 1.0 of a proposal to provide an alternate first-year computer science sequence. Perhaps you are wondering why I have linked to this proposal, given that I am not a CS student, faculty member, or UW staffer. First, I think the proposal illustrates that the source of UW's reputation has very little to do with its Senate or other official governing bodies. UW's success (and by extension its reputation) depends on the individual efforts of faculty members like Prof. Ragde and Gordon Cormack and students like Lisa Rubini and Ryan Golbeck. Amidst discussions prompted by magazine ratings, it is easy to lose sight of the importance of creativity and intelligence.

» Read more: A Proposal for an Alternate First-Year CS Sequence at UW