[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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