Rebecca wrote:
I think is an excellent idea: kudos to you both.
The two things that I'd been keen to know first, however, are - would this involve a reduction in the number of arbitrators, as in Michael's proposal,
No. The number of arbitrators could well be increased. Michael wanted to reduce the number of arbitrators to reduce the number of people required for a decision, our proposal is to reduce that number more directly, while retaining a low workload on each arbitrator and keeping a wide variety of views on the committee.
and also - how many of the current group of arbitrators are active on IRC? I know James is (provided he plans to run for re-election - I hope so) and also Mav, but I'm a bit concerned that some people who've played a fairly crucial role this far - Fred Bauder, for one, may not use IRC.
Not all of them use IRC. We can provide technical support to help arbitrators install a client on their computer. We could also set up a CGI:IRC gateway, or make a proxy available, if it proves to be necessary. The idea of setting up a CGI:IRC gateway for all the Wikipedia channels has been suggested before, we could probably just do that, if we have the hardware resources.
-- Tim Starling