2008/9/8 Ross Gardler ross.gardler@oucs.ox.ac.uk:
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.
This is of course the way anything actually gets done around Wikimedia in general :-)
IRC is not a place to *make* decisions (unless it's an official IRC meeting - make sure the new corp. expressly notes that meetings can be online!), but it's *fantastically* valuable for sanity checking and coming up with robust ideas that people will see and go "of course, that's obviously sensible."
- d.