[Noisebridge-discuss] Voting experiment.
jim
jim at well.com
Fri Sep 10 21:01:07 UTC 2010
On Fri, 2010-09-10 at 13:51 -0500, Sai Emrys wrote:
> ... and what Al was proposing, AFAICT, is supermajority rule rather
> than majority.
>
> In an everyone-vetoes system, troll minorities have no reason to
> bother working with the majority or even attempting to reach
> negotiated compromises... just as much as in a simple majority or
> plurality system, voting blocks larger than x% have no reason to
> bother working with smaller ones. Fixing that lack of impetus to
> compromise I think is the true aim.
JS: my experience in other communities (and to some degree
in this one) is that mostly people use the consensus process
properly: to block decision until their interests have been
considered, which usually requires some adjustment to a
proposal so's not to screw up the objector, and is usually
not a big deal adjustment; sometimes negotiation has been a
matter of polite begging, also not usually a big deal.
Regardless the size of the majority, a voting process as
usually practiced does not formally guarantee that a new
proposal must address existing concerns in the case that
existing concerns may be threatened.
the idea of polling to get a sense of community interest
seems a good adjunct to a consensus process and might carry
weight to an argument for or against some new proposal. seems
to me such a poll would gather not only numbers of members
for, against, and neutral, but would also gather some
reflection of intensity of each member's feelings.
that there is the possibility of "troll minorities" does
not seem to have much weight against the benefits and the
facts of experience in my eyes. a whimsical troll position
is not well-tolerated by communities; i don't recall any
effects more than maybe a kind of pain-in-the-ass delay
while the community talks the troll down (and usually it's
not a whimsical troll but some loner who's got a beef that
matters to that person).
there's a lot of weight in the argument that we have to
consider every one of each other's concerns, and that seems
the primary justification of consensus.
what is the primary justification of voting other than
convenience of making a decision for or against?
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