Thomas Dalton wrote:
2008/9/8 Andrew Turvey raturvey@yahoo.co.uk:
I'm not entirely sure I understand the process here for making decisions. Reading through http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_UK_v2.0 I can see a few decisions are already being presented as if they have been made:
- The initial Board will have 3-5 members
- The initial Board will serve only until the AGM
- WM-UK will be a Company Limited by Guarantee
- The name will be "Wiki Information Network"
How have/should these decisions be made? a consensus on the email list? a consensus on the wiki page?
Consensus on IRC for the most part, but they're all still open for discussion if you disagree with any of them (except the 2nd one - that's the law!).
I'm not objecting to these decisions themselves (I came too late to be part of them).
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