On 9/3/06, Akash Mehta draicone@gmail.com wrote:
But what did you intend as a definitive threshold? To ensure accuracy for any important decision it would have to be around 90%. Surely if one person raises a valuable point, and one that is worth voting 'not yet' for, at least 10% will follow. But 90% will help reduce the effect of mild sockpuppet use etc. Then again, if we allow experienced users to strike votes, we should be going for 95%...
The person who proposes the consensus poll sets the threshold in the static contract. If the threshold is set too low, then people will vote "not yet" and the contract can then be withdrawn and the person can then try again with a higher threshold. It's a little awkward to change what's in the static contract, but in practice people will probably come to realise that a certain percentage will work most of the time.
The beauty of the consensus poll model is that the voting choices are "yes" and "not yet", in which case the person can propose changes to the action plan so they are happy (providing that standards of behaviour are maintained so that people work constructively in editing the plan).
So the substance of the proposal is always reacting to what people actually want to achieve. If 10% of people aren't happy, then the proposal is continuously tweaked until enough people are happy.
(Really, tweaking continues until enough people are happy to satusfy the cloture threshold, at which point the proposal is locked, and the final consensus is judged a set time after this point.)