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