2008/9/8 Ross Gardler ross.gardler@oucs.ox.ac.uk:
I'm not objecting to these decisions themselves (I came too late to be part of them).
Good. Because if we had followed your methods they would probably not yet have been made.
However, I do object to decisions being made on IRC (or any other form of synchronouse communication). Synchronicity requires one to be present at a given time. In a distributed community this is not possible.
IRC (and other synchronous communications) should only be used to formulate proposals. Decisions must (IMHO) be made on the mailing list with a minimum period of 72 hours for objections.
You can use "lazy consensus" to smooth the flow of these proposals to decisions and avoid the need for vote counting. Lazy consensus means that a proposal becomes a decision if nobody objects within the a defined period of time. If someone objects the proposal is discussed until a new satisfactory proposal is written and the lazy consensus period commences again.
Should it be impossible to come to a unaminous consensus with respect to a proposal then a vote can be called.
Obviously this is not a fully detailed decision making process, some decisions need to be formalised with a vote. However, for most decisions this process is easy to adminster, effective and (most importantly) inclusive.
Ross
It is about getting people's interest. Saying "the previous board has collapsed lets start discussing ideas on how to start a new one" isn't going to get you as far as "the previous board has collapsed here's a way that will let us start a new one". Sure it's possible that everyone would reject the method but they didn't so we are nicely motoring along with most of the stuff we need to do pre-election done and only a couple of worries about the election that I can work around at a pinch.