After a year (?) or so on the arbitration committee, and not being
particularly interested in staying on it, there's one main obstacle I've
seen: A lack of people with sufficient free time and interest to wade
through the often complicated disputes. It's not, in my opinion,
problems in getting together a quorum, or even problems in discussing
contentious disputes that are the primary stumbling block. It's just
the lack of getting *anything* rolling at all.
Often parties to disputes will dump literally hundreds of links to edit
histories, and engage in lengthy multi-page accusations and
counter-accusations. Someone has to sort through that and try to make
sense of it. It's not a particularly interesting job, of course.
Once someone does sort through it, and proposes something, the actual
voting is comparatively unproblematic. There have been occasions when
voting has been too slow, but that can be dealt with by e.g. leaving
nagging messages on peoples' talk pages. The biggest and hardest to
overcome delays are those where voting has simply never started, because
nobody had the time or inclination to wade through the pile of evidence
and accusations to distill a set of options to vote on in the first
place. How to solve that I don't really know.
-Mark