--- Jon thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
- ArbCom to have 24 members (ie enough to cope with absences, resignations,
etc)
Having more people will likely make it harder to reach consensus on any one case and increase the number of votes needed to enact anything. Thus this could cause more harm than good. Adding one or two extra seats per yearly election along with finding ways to minimize the effect I just mentioned would likely be a more practical course of action. There are also a limited number of people who have both the trust of the community and want to serve. During the last election, for example, I think it would have been a disaster to add more than a few seats since that would have resulted in some fairly controversial people getting elected.
- 7 Arbitrators to hear each case - the arbitrators to hear each case being
decided on a taxi rank system (amongst those making themselves available in any given week or fortnight)
This could be workable for a slowly-growing ArbCom but would limit the potential pool of people who could move a case along. The way things work now works well so long as we have enough active members around.
- The first Arbitrator in the queue will be responsible for writing up the
initial findings of fact and proposed decisions (this is both to share the workload, plus to ensure that one arbitrator does not gain undue influence by writing them all - this is not a criticism of Fred, who tends to be the first arbitrator at present to write these - more an acknowledgment that it would be better to get a variety of opinions - clearly if the other arbitrators disagree with the findings and proposed decision, it will be rejected anyway, as is the case now).
This would not be workable due to the fact that some people really are better at proposing items while others rarely if ever do so either for time-constraint issues or a lack of ability. Checking the logic of already-proposed items and voting is always much easier than proposing items in the first place.
-- mav
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