Governance Committee Meeting 1.1: Decision Making Process

On second thought, this process is a respectable process, and it is a process that can be used to change itself with a reasonably high standard of agreement. It is limited in scope to this committee, so the stakes of missing the mark are low. I will listen to dissent, but for now I lean fuck it let's proceed with it. I do think it is more respectful to minorities than a straight 66 percent vote.

I think it's good too, certainly as a framework. We could debate the exact percentages needed to go to a second discussion or pass the proposal but those seem good to me as well. To wookie's point, I agree that it seems like a structure well-suited to changing itself.

My main concern is the lack of activity within this subforum--it feels like >half the committee are MIA. I think that's the biggest barrier to moving quickly--there are a handful of us that seem to be discussing and largely in agreement, but without a larger sense of quorum it feels like we're handcuffed.

At any point, any group of peeps may freely associate, which is also often called a "caucus". These caucuses can each self-select their own participants, and pick their own internal process. If any of these caucuses come up with a proposal, any member of this committee can then officially make that proposal to this committee as an individual.

Note: that the above is equally true if we were doing 50%+1 w/Roberts Rules -or- a consensus based process -or- any other system I can imagine. Peeps who wanna start caucusing about, say mod rules, have always have been able to do so. They can do so right now too. I'd suggest peeps need to stop waiting around to be told what to do.

I'd also like to point out that what we got going on now has nothing to do with what decision making rules we end up adopting (50%+1 w/Roberts, etc/etc). We quite literally haven't gotten to that point yet. What's going on is we are trying to run the functional equivalent to a business meeting using an interwebs forum as the medium. This problem, so to speak, will always exist. Take a peak at the gold standard for 50%+1, Robert's, say regarding a yearly convention. Imagine every one of those steps requires, say a 24 hour, turn around.  

One possible alternative would be to attempt to have a "live" meeting. If a critical mass of us could block off the same time in the real world, we could temporarily dispense with the, say 24 hour, turn around periods.

IIRC kerowo originally suggested minimum 24  hours to hit all the time zones. This make sense to me, but I'm not tied onto that number.

The decision chart is fine with me. Reminder, we are discussing rules only for the internal use in this committee. What we propose for, say, site-wide ratification, is a whole different conversation. I'd suggest we should pick the first serviceable plan we can agree on, and try hard not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, in this particular case.

I'll close with a little maths. We now have 22 members on this committee. If four abstain or don't vote, then...

12-6 = 66.7%
13-5 = 72.2%
14-4 = 77.8%
15-3 = 83.3%
16-2 = 88.9%
17-1 = 94.4%

The one thing I think we need to keep in mind is that nothing is absolute. Changes can be made if necessary. In fact they most certainly will be. As long as we have a reasonably sound framework we should be ok. It seems the slowness is frustrating to a lot of people so perhaps we start formulating questions like has been suggested and get multiple polls going at once and try and get a better picture of what people want.

I second.