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Flagging participation
Hey guys,
It seems we are all diverging from one another with respect to our tastes lately, and this is leading to low participation rates in the discussions (including myself here, obviously, having missed two recently). If we had more members this would be fine, but when only 3 or 4 people read every book and then don't have much to say about it, it's noticeable.
I'm wondering if we can talk about this. Is there something we can do to alter the book selection process? Like, maybe we all nominate a bunch of books, then vote on the nominations, and pick a selection from those with the highest votes - at least this might ensure we are picking books more people want to read. We could also move to bi-monthly if that would help. I'd rather have 6 strongly discussed readings per year than 12 limpid ones, wouldn't you?
Any thoughts on these? Other suggestions?
Thanks
Comments
I'd be up for nomination-and-election thing. Maybe using a weighted vote.
I like the monthly cycle and wonder if dropping to bi-monthly might lead to even less participation? But your main point is well taken. But then, I enjoy the format and the range of books chosen. Even when a book selected for a particular month doesn't really do much for me I like persevering with it - in contrast to our local book club where I don't have any real qualms about not finishing a book I don't get on with. (There are lots of complicated reasons for this, not just the choice of genre).
Having a nominate-and-vote approach could work, but on the other hand several of the books in the last year have been ones where I have not heard of the book and/or author. Indeed, other than some of @NeilNjae 's choices (and of course my own), pretty much all the titles were new to me back as far as December 2024. If I'd had them on a list to vote for them, would I have done so? Maybe yes, and maybe it would have made me do a bit of research into each one.
How would the weighting work?
FYI for the newer members, we've tried several different methods of picking books over the years. We started with straight up one-member-picks just like we do now. Then we went to one member nominates three and those three are voted on. This was because someone in the group felt we needed a hedge to avoid 'bad books' being chosen (i.e. books they thought were bad?) - I was never convinced it made much different in the quality of books selected, and anyway when do we ever agree on what the good books are?. Then we went to just having the administrators nominate 3 books, which were voted on. Then we returned to each-member-picks. I found that with the voting, people we dis-inclined to read the books if they hadn't voted for them. But that was on G+ and we had many more members then, most of whom were casual.
Weighted voting is simply voting ordinally - i.e. nominate 3 books, each voter ranks them first, second, and third. First gets three points, second gets two points, and third gets one point. Most points is the one selected. What it tends to do is make the least objected to item the one selected.