Decision process for Heraldic names and symbols

(NB: See detail text below)

 

Details:

Note: "discussion" occurs at every step, including discussion and education around filtering criteria that might influence subsequent votes.

1. Brainstorm and record as many ideas as possible - among the working group, plus suggestions observed (and encouraged) from elsewhere. During the brainstorm phase, don't try to filter out for aesthetic or registration-related reasons, because a even a "bad" idea can trigger several good ones. However, flagging for possible conflicts may take place as it is informative and may generate better suggestions.

2. Once there is a large set of ideas, end the brainstorming phase (with some advance warning). Quickly do a final pre-filter of the full set to a range of "looks registerable" ideas - even if some of those included might potentially require conflict permission (but don't do that now!)

3. Use a voting process among the working group to winnow that list down to a top ten (five core plus five spares). Possible voting method: give each WG member five votes to deploy as they wish among the entire list. They could spread those around, or, for example, give all five to their favourite.

4. Invest work to "prove" the top five as being registerable in principle - that may involve checking for the possibility of getting conflict permissions, etc.  If a candidate is eliminated for Reasons that can't be avoided via some light tweakage, promote one of the spares to the top five.

5. Once a final set of up to five preferred candidates exist, conduct a populace-wide "ranking" survey on acceptability, to narrow down to a top two based on weighted rankings (it's rather unlikely that one out of the five would end up as a absolute winner from this vote - hence the next step).

6. In a second, more formal survey, run the top two against each other so that we can have a definitive winner.

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