Dante Alighieri wrote:
Could people please write to me privately to volunteer for mediation and arbitration committees? You can't be on both, but please indicate your willingness to serve on mediation, arbitration, or either, and your preference, if any, so that I may make some selections based on what people are willing to do.
Ugh. In my opinion this is a bad idea. The way I was thinking about the committees is that they'd be chosen more or less at random on a regular basis from a pool of volunteers.
Well, the big problem I see with this concept is that it isn't like we have an excess of volunteers. I'm looking for around 11-15 people for each of arbitration and mediation. That's 22-30 people. If we had 300 volunteers, then rotating frequently and randomly would be interesting to be sure.
Another disadvantage of randomness is that some people will be better at this than other people. I think that voting will help guide us to better selections in the long run, and provides a popular check on power that randomness might not.
--Jimbo