Guillaume Blanchard wrote:
This rigid vote where no alternative proposition can be submit is at the antipode of my vision of a consensus.
Well, this logo contest is an experiment in voting. It has gone well in some ways, and not so well in other ways. In any case, no matter how we evaluate it overall, we can all agree that it has been educational, exposing some of the issues that we are going to have to deal with as we form scalable, stable, consensus-driven decision methods.
And I don't see anything encouraging in this discussion.
What do you mean? I see a lot that's encouraging. Look at all the discussion that we are having. Look how hard people are working to try to find mutually agreeable solutions. Look how civilized and cautious the decisionmaking is.
The current experiment is a good one because the choice of a logo from any of the fine leading contenders is not a life or death decision for the project. None of the choices available to us are bad, and so we can learn from this in a low-risk way.
Later, there will have to be some major policy decisions. In the past, these have always been made by consensus, which in reality boils down to us listening to all sides and encouraging different factions to accomodate each other so that we can find solutions that are better all around for everyone.
That process works, or at least it has so far. But there have always been concerns about how well it would scale. The more people we have involved, the more important it is that we have a more formalized _process_ that people can support even when they don't support the final _outcome_.
Let me explain that further with an example from the real world. I support, generally speaking, the processes of constitutionally limited democracy. So in that sense, I support the system *even when the candidate I don't prefer* gets elected.
In a small group, the consensus method works. When a final decision has to be made, then a benevolent dictator who really does look out for the interests of as many different people as possible also works. People can, and have, supported that process as effective, even when they didn't get their way on every last detail.
As we get bigger, we need to preserve and improve on our success in that area: when decisions are made, they need to be as inclusive as possible, i.e. to make as many people happy as possible, and at the same time, they need to be made by a process that people can support even when their exact preferences are not chosen.
Do we agree about that?
We've done a couple of experiments with voting. I've always been a skeptic of voting, but the one thing that voting can do is generate legitimacy for decisions. People can support the outcome of a vote, even when the vote doesn't go their way.
I like one of the logos best of all. I hope that it wins. But if it doesn't, I can live with that. They are all reasonable choices, and I like that we went through a process that people can live with.
But it is JUST A LOGO. So a serious amount of relaxation is probably in order. :-)
--Jimbo