Suggestions for easy to use online poll?

[Dunk]

A group of people and I are e-mailing one another and trying to come to a consensus of where and when to meet. The aim of our meeting is to mostly introductory and informal, to lay the foundation to create a Cleveland chapter of SP-USA later in May.

I was about to e-mail everyone to propose a vote on the venue of our meeting - because I'd like everyone to be comfortable and keep things as democratic as possible. Then I realized motioning for a vote over e-mail would probably not be as good an idea as setting up a link that one could click on, and then vote on a venue, and just using those results to decide. So I'm in the process of googling for a free, online poll I could set up - one that isn't strictly used for embedding on other websites (which is all I can seem to find), but can I suppose be it's own site. I hope this isn't confusing, but I figured that if anyone knew of such a site, it would be RevLefters.

[¿Que?]

The only one I know of is survey monkey. Can't vouch for it tho.

[Kotze]

Suppose the places where members of a group live exist on a line. If they vote on where to meet using rankings and everybody votes in a selfish and honest manner (that is based on proximity to where they live), there is something called a Condorcet Winner in the voting pattern. Suppose the places where members of that group live are consecutively named city 1, city 2, etc. and the name of the city you live in is also on your membership card. If all these cards are consecutively ordered, the card in the middle shows the Condorcet Winner. Another nice property of a method that finds the CW is that such a method doesn't suffer much from the problem of similar proposals eating into each others winning probability. A proposal that is CW stays CW if other competing proposals are deleted. In two-dimensional cases there isn't always a Condorcet Winner, but the probability is very high.

The Condorcet Internet Voting Service (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/civs.html) displays poll results using various methods that find the CW, if one exists. You need to declare before which tie resolver is to be followed in case without CW. I recommend Schulze, which is the most popular (it's used by the Debian project and Wikimedia, among others).

[jake williams]

http://www.doodle.com/

Works well if people use it, and you have good poll options.