On Mon, 2004-03-29 at 23:44, Ray Saintonge wrote: 
Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Angela wrote:
>
>> --- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <jheiskan@welho.com> wrote:
>>
>>>Please, let us invest the Mediation Committee with an
>>>explicit power of binding referral to the Arbitration
>>>Committee...
>>>
>>I completely agree with Cimon. If participants in
>>mediation have followed all the steps of the dispute
>>resolution process, mediation has failed, and the
>>mediation committee recommends arbitration, is there
>>any reason the arbitrators still need to vote on
>>whether to accept the case? Can they not trust the
>>mediation committee to make these referrals? 
>>
>
>I agree with this completely.
>
Although I agree in principle, there is still a need to condider the 
workload that the arbitrators have, and the amount of time that they 
have to do it.

Ec

I have continued to consider this matter, and I seriously feel that your concern is exaggerated. The only thing the arbitration committee would need
to figure out, is in which form they would decide and send back a censure of a
"timewasting" referral by the mediation committee.

The possibility of such a censure would in most cases stop the mediation committee from becoming an easy "rubber stamp" for any old troll. As the mediation committee is currently set up as the communal spittoon anyhow, an even moderately worded censure by the arbitration committee would necessarily carry weight, if the censure itself was not lightly given.

The arbitration committee might also decide to make a swift decision of dismissal; with the normal 6 votes needed, of course, without finding the referral by the mediation committee itself worth censure.

Or there are of course other ways to set it up... Your imagination is your limit. I trust that if the wise heads in the arbitration committee really seriously decided to take this on board, a solution that is in the interest of both the mediation committee and arbitration committees workload limitation can be worked out.

One thing that would help that, BTW, would be a regularized form of communication between the two bodies.

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen