James D. Forrester wrote:
I am not for a minute saying that it was discussed here. I am just pointing out that discussions here (or, indeed, anywhere, on- or off-wiki), have nothing to do with how the Committee runs itself. It is not a community organisation. The community has, for the time being, agreed that the Committee, Jimbo's experiment, should be treated as sovereign (the "Arbitration policy ratification" documents). That is all.
Well, in practice that makes it a community organization of sorts. More to the point, it's only useful insofar as the community sees the arbitration committee as performing a useful function in a useful way. If it were ever the case that there were strong community consensus against some portion of how the AC works, then it would be problematic for it to continue working that way, fiat or no. Legally, of course, it can do whatever, since the community doesn't own the servers, but it would be undesirable to say the least.
-Mark