Tim Starling wrote:
The first and most important measure to improve the speed of the AC is to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a review of such decisions by the full committee.
How would it be determined which three? Based on the IRC suggestion, it seems likely that it would be the first three to come along.
Letting the arbitrators divide into three-member panels has been suggested before, and has some merit to it. In my proposal to reorganize the Arbitration Committee, I didn't address restructuring the arbitration process itself because this kind of proposal doesn't need the election context to happen. This could be implemented now if we want it, or it could be implemented sometime after the election. Shrinking the size of the committee, on the other hand, is best accomplished as part of the election cycle.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by IRC, not email. Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more than three of them.
How much deliberation actually occurs via email to begin with? I know there are several arbitrators who are not big fans of conducting deliberations in private. Also, human nature being what it is, I'm not sure how much we can do to move the deliberation process to any particular forum if it doesn't happen organically. The Arbitration Committee was given a message board when first set up, which went nowhere. Nothing is preventing arbitrators from deliberating on IRC now if they want to, but some of them are not present in that forum.
--Michael Snow