rseserman said:

Even the concept of running the bank democratically was questioned: “If Joe has enough friends to vote funding for Joe’s business which will eventually fail, what good does for the community” or “Democracy is good as an oversight mechanism but operationally… how would be the army to operate democratically?”

The democratic process maybe can be changed from an active involvement, which is also very time consuming, to a passive way. I am thinking to ask members to allocate their money over a given set of  areas of lending as they join. They can change the allocation as they want  but at their own convenience thus avoiding a periodic voting process that can be very counter productive. The actual lending decisions will be left for lending professionals, trained to the bank rules.

We do not plan to make business (operational) decisions democratically. Depositors will set lending priorities, but will not decide on individual loans.

Depositors always have the choice whether or not to be actively involved in decisions that are in their domain. Taking away that choice would decrease democracy with no benefit to the depositors. It is important that SOMEONE think again about the lending priorities from time to time, because the situation in the community is always changing. The depositors should be allowed a voice in those discussions and decisions.

Philip Beard said:It's unclear how the multiple-choice preference example given (A+ABCDFNo) relates to the Condorcet paired-preference method. Aren't you conflating the two here?

Multiple choice grading is a way of expressing preferences. Condorcet is a way of analyzing data and calculating results.There is no conflict between them.

If someone grades option #1 "A" and option #2 "C", for example, it is clear that the person prefers option #1 to option #2. Similarly, if the person grades two options the same, then we can infer that the person has no preference between the two options. This is all the information that is required for Condorcet calculation.

Grading gives more information with less effort, than having to compare each pair of options individually.

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