Votes
A vote is how a decision actually gets made at KmikeyM. Shareholders are asked a question about Mike Merrill’s life or work, they vote their shares, and the result binds him. This page explains what the votes are, why there are two different kinds, and what they have decided since 2008. The complete record is at List of Votes.
The mechanics of ownership and authority, who can vote and what a binding result means, are set out in Governance and Legal Structure. This page is about the practice.
Two kinds of vote, running side by side
The record is not one stream. It is two, and they are two different kinds of question rather than two eras of the same system.
Governance votes are binary. A proposal is put, shareholders approve or reject it, and the result binds. These ran from 2008 on kmikeym.com and decide whether. They are the votes catalogued in List of Votes.
Follow-through votes are multi-option. Once something is approved, a second vote settles how or which, choosing between named alternatives rather than answering yes or no. These began at the end of 2018 on a separate platform and are still running.
The second did not replace the first, at least not quickly. They ran side by side for nearly three years, and in that window the newer one was already carrying more of the load: 41 follow-through votes against 24 binary ones. Some proposals were deliberately split across the two, with a binary vote deciding that a thing would happen and a multi-option vote deciding what form it took. A few of those pairs say so explicitly, pointing from one platform to the other.
The last binary vote closed in October 2021. Nothing was announced and nothing was retired. By the time the old system stopped being used, the handover had mostly already happened.
What gets voted on
Almost anything. The record includes his diet, his hair, his clothes, his politics, where he travels, what he watches, how company money is invested, whether to take a job, and whether to have a vasectomy.
Some of it is consequential and some of it is not, and the project has never drawn that line in advance. A vote on whether to grow a mustache sits beside a vote directing his life insurance payout to shareholders on his death.
The votes that changed the project most were often about the project itself. Shareholders have voted on how new shares are released, on paying collaborators in stock, on what Mike may keep private during a negotiation, and on whether he was doing a good job.
The system jams, in public
The interesting part of the record is not the votes that passed. It is the ones that did not, and the ones that had to be asked twice.
The very first proposal failed. In February 2008 shareholders were asked whether to start projects before the site was officially announced, and said no, 45% to 55%. The question was put again five months later, reworded as “Okay, Should We Start Projects Now?”, and passed unanimously.
One committee seat took three attempts in sixteen days. Filling a position on the K5M Film Council in January 2009, the largest shareholder would not confirm the first nominee. A second was put up while the first vote was still running, and everyone else rejected him. Both failed at 44%. A third nominee, chosen because nobody had a reason to object to him, passed at 100%.
Shareholders have voted against Mike’s own judgment about his own life. The 2008 vasectomy proposal, which he wrote and argued for, was rejected at 46%. See The Vasectomy Vote.
They have told him he was doing badly. The periodic confidence vote is a plain question about whether the project is on the right course. One year it returned 34%.
And they have refused to let him walk away. In January 2018, with sixteen projects open and none of them finishable, Mike asked to be released from all of them at once. Shareholders rejected it, narrowly. What passed instead, two weeks later, was a reorganization requiring every future proposal to carry a defined criterion for success, on the grounds that vague proposals can never be closed out at all.
That exchange is the clearest thing in the record about what the arrangement is for. The shareholders would not accept an ending, and they would not accept the conditions that had made an ending necessary either.
The record, and what is public
The two systems are open to different degrees, and the difference is not deliberate so much as historical.
On the older platform the list of votes is public and the individual pages are not. Anyone can see that a vote happened; reading the proposal, the result and the margin needs a shareholder account. List of Votes exists to close that gap, and for the votes decided there it is the only place a non-shareholder can read what was asked and how it went.
The newer platform is fully public. The proposal, the options, the result and the discussion underneath are all readable by anyone.
What the two records hold is also lopsided. The binary votes have a complete account of results and almost no account of what came of them. The follow-through votes have both, because the platform keeps the result and Mike has written a note on most of them describing what actually happened, including the times a decision was carried and then quietly not done.
One limit applies to both. Individual voting is not republished here. Both platforms show which shareholders voted and how many shares they held, and the newer one carries their comments. How a named person voted is their business rather than the project’s.