No matter what form the ballot takes, single amendment or IRV on the various models, do we need to let people know that NOT deciding, or choosing NO amendment, is tantamount to asking ToE to move off board?
I will try to phrase the presentation of the amendment to make it clear that if people want a forum for discussing sensitive issues, then it is in their interest to have a mechanism for keeping people out of that forum who have proved they can't be trusted in that kind of environment.
Even if ToE as it exists now, that is, the posters in that community, moved off board, that wouldn't eliminate the existence of an age restricted forum on this board, and that would still need the kind of protection we are trying to set up.
Voronwe, did you suggest that seriously, are were you trying to force some kind of realization upon people?
Now I beg your attention on a different matter.
Wilma has given some clarification on her proposal for the ballot.
I think it does represent an intermediary stage between straight anonymous voting and straight email objections that we haven't yet seen.
This is what I understood her to be proposing:
All people who object would send emails to the Rangers explaining their objections. The Rangers would post a 'sanitized' version of the objection in the forum (that is, just characterize it very generally). At the end of the objection period, the forum would have a poll vote recording the number of ToE members who do not want the petitioner in the forum,
based on the objections reported by the Ranger.
My understanding of the rationale behind this proposal is that it would not leave Rangers in charge of assessing the validity of the objections, but would leave that to the ToE membership. The practical difference I see is that it gives the forum an idea of what the objections are without being actual statements against the person. I'm not sure how significant a difference that is.
The sticking point for me in what Wilma proposed is that I don't like the idea of Rangers forwarding invalid objections. So using Wilma's examples, I would prefer they forward the hate mail objection (citing internet harrassment), but would not forward the intuitive feeling objection unless the objecting member cited the reason for the intuitive bad feeling. And 'because of my Tarot reading this morning' would not be legitimate, but 'because of the angry way I've seen him speak to other posters' would be.
The way I see this differing from Estel's plan is that everyone formally objecting submits a reason and then the forum votes as a body on whether to back the objections (this is the group dynamic that I personally would very much like to avoid because I think it leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth who isn't part of the group doing the rejecting and accepting). Essentially we'd be deciding to allow people to 'object' who have no objection of their own. With Estel's plan, presumably the people who vote in the poll have reasons of their own for objecting, they just don't have to state them? We'd also have to determine a threshold or series of thresholds with variations, as with Estel's compromise proposal.
Does this seem to people like a legitimately different enough option that I should work on incorporating into the ballot?