board77

Voronwë_the_Faithful wrote:

Quote:

But of course we also don't want to create a situation where the same 18% of the members is voting, making decisions, virtually running the board all the time.

I don't know if I agree. I mean, if only 18% of the members care about these things, maybe that 18% SHOULD be running the board all the time.

Pragmatically, Voronwë, that's a reasonable point. However, if 18% are content to run things, then 82% are content to let them, and with the erosion of time we would probably end up with a culture of complacency. We've seen what can happen when such a culture gets "stirred up" by a group of people who've discovered they do after all care.

If, on the other hand, votes have to be accompanied by reminders to vote, and people are being poked and prodded, complacency can't take hold. People who want a messageboard in which they can be utterly uninvolved and that never asks anything of them might get annoyed and move on, but maybe others would discover that they do like being involved. We will always need new activists to replace those who drift away . . . or stomp away.

I think 40% is unreasonably optimistic. As Prim said, we were lucky to get 50 votes on charter issues, with a population I would think is the most interested that we can ever expect.

I think interest, expressed as a percentage of members willing to vote, can only decline. I'm not saying I like it, I'm just saying those are the numbers and a reasonable prediction. Please, prove me wrong.

I would, except that I think that you right.

I've studied quite a few organizations for various reasons over the years. It still amazes me how closely the 80/20 rule predicts human behavior when there isn't external pressure, and sometimes with it.

I think we should go for the 40%.

People cannot be let to become complacent! That defeats the purpose of having membership-wide votes and having a democratic board. If a descision is made that the membership doesn't like, sure it's their fault for not voting, but we could prevent potential trouble, to some degree, by trying to get more people to vote. I would be more than happy to spend the time sending out emails, posting announcements, anything to get people to take even the slightest bit of interest.

I keep teetering and tottering on this. Like Mossy, I don't want to just accept apathy as inevitable. Some of our members don't care and never will—and that's fine; we're a safe place to do that, I think—but I would hate to see new members get acculturated not to care or to regard votes as silly.

On the other hand, I don't want to make it impossible to change anything. And that 40% number scares me a bit. That would be 74 votes right now. On our complicated PM vote on Article 6, what did we get? 43 votes?

I don't want to make it impossible to amend the charter because we might have to do quite a lot of that in the beginning.

Considering the length of the thing, and the fact that it was written by multiple committees, and the fact that as I have tried to actually use Michel Delving and the Rangers have tried to deal with situations by looking things up in the charter, we know that adjustments are going to have to be made ...

If the 80/20 rule is Life As We Know It and we have to reconcile ourselves to that, then the 30%/67% is what we should be using.

I don't like it ... I don't like to give in, you know, and would much rather shoot for 40%/75% ... but I want to be pragmatic and not saddle us with something unworkable.

Also ... one other thing to consider, if we ever have to amend the article on amendments it will be much easier to make the requirements tighter than it will be to make the requirements looser. If we are not getting the quorum we need, we will need to get that quorum in order to change the quorum. So, all things considered, if there is doubt about our ability to maintain the higher numbers, we should probably go with the lower numbers and then upwardly amend them if we discover that that we have an more active membership than anticipated.

(or ... I might change my mind for the third time in the morning ...)

Jn

Maybe the answer is to maintain the quorum, but require a higher percentage.

Yes, that goes along with the point Alandriel was making in the Binding Vote thread, that if the quorum is weak the supermajority should be high.

We can say 30% for the quorum and 75% or even 80% for the supermajority ... we can be confident of getting those sorts of numbers because the charter ratifications have been nearly unanimous so far.

Requiring a large supermajority might be a good way, also, to ensure that future committees don't rock too far away from the central tendency of the members.

Jn

A solution I hadn't thought clearly about.

If a small minority are going to bear the responsibility, I suppose they ought to be extra certain what they want.

And, I suppose, if the margin among those who vote is that wide, we can hope that most of those who don't vote would at least favor the winning side if they thought about it.

I would still rather have the higher quorum, but I can live with a supermajority to balance out the small quorum.

I'm very concerned about the possibility of never reaching a quorom. I hesitated to make this suggestion earlier, when we are considering quoroms, but I have now convinced myself that we are being totally unrealistic.

There are relatively simple ways to make a self adjusting mechanism. These are becoming increasingly important in some areas. Sensor arrays are an example. You can never predict which ones will be up and able to contribute, but you need some way to make reliable decisions based on their information. When they are deployed, you have them self organize and report back their configuration and abilities. You then have to assess the quality of their decisions and the applicability of their opinion to the next incident.

The aspect of this that may be usable to us is the assessment of the general quality of the decision just made. Here, the decision just made is the estimate of a legitimate quorom. Constant reassessment allows you to track the dependability of the array until it degenerates into uselessness. It's a problem that has several more dimensions than we have to deal with, but some aspects apply to our situation.

For example, if we guess that we can reach a quorom of 40% of active users and we have 6 successive binding votes that fail to attract a quorom, we probably were too optimistic. You can be pragmatic and take the set of actual votes from the 6 binding votes, determine the average, and use that to determine the quorom for the next vote. This is a dynamic system that adjusts the quorom as general interest in voting rises and falls.

Using a self adjusting quorom would prevent constant fiddling with the voting scheme, which, as Jnyusa said, could get trapped in its own inability to reach a quorom. In practice, you have to deal with startup and stabilization issues and avoidance of abnormal conditions. If anyone is interested in this idea, I can lay out the whole scheme.

We will have the results from the charter votes to use as a starting point, although I have already said I think interest in the charter is probably higher than interest in future votes.

I can agree that with the uncertainty about what constitutes a quorom that we should consider raising the threshold for winning. This could also be self adjusting, but I'm sure no one is ready for that.

So you mean a moving average? I'd be concerned about the possibility that such a system would step outside a "sensible" value—if, say, we had a vote on a very controversial or very popular issue that led to an extremely high turnout, the quorum number for the next vote might be higher than can be attained for an "ordinary" vote. Or, if increasing apathy leads to lower and lower turnouts, binding votes could become too easy, and a small number of people could change and possibly take control of the system of governance. There's something familiar about that second example. . . . .

Idylle,

That's a very interesting idea. I like it. But your sensor arrays must have some minimum reliability standards. If too many of the sensors are not contributing, then you really do not have sufficient info for a decision and should not make one.

In our case, a moving average might have a steep downward secular trend.

I don't object to using a moving average if it has a floor under it ... though thinking about it this way, I'm not sure what the floor should be. Twenty percent?

Jn

Prim,

Generally, you define the size of the set, throw out the high and the low within the set, and take the average of the rest.

Jnyusa,

For the purposes for which sensor arrays are used, you usually have an after-the-fact way to verify the validity of the warning. You know the array is useless once its results fall below an acceptable level.

Our situation is somewhat different. We are already in the condition where the majority don't care enough to vote. I think we are headed towards the vast majority not caring. So, what do you do when you no longer want the majority of those willing to vote, to be allowed to make a decision? Assuming you think that is reasonable, the suggestion of a lower threshhold will invalidate the vote. Then what do you do? If it is a one off situation, it doesn't matter, but what if it accurately reflects the current interest of the members of the board and runs below the threshold for several votes? You need an escape hatch. Possibilities include empowering the leadership of the board, include the Mayor, the Rangers, and the Lore Master, to make some decision intended to rectify the situation. I don't know what that is.

I expect that in a year, a normal binding vote will attract about 20% of the active members, so I think setting the threshold at 20% is too high. Howeve, so long as we specify that requires immediate action by the leadership to remedy the problem, I won't cause any harm.

We're assessing all this on the basis of the charter ratification votes, and assuming that their turnouts are higher than we can expect for other votes. But is that necessarily the case?

Once we've finished the charter, our only scheduled vote will be the yearly election of the Mayor. Any other votes will arise out of problems that need correction. Some of these problems are likely to be much more controversial, and much more interesting to the membership at large, than the charter has proved to be.

I live in a state that has many (far too many) initiatives and referenda on a typical ballot, and the controversial ones tend to boost turnout. These votes will be our initiatives and referenda; might they get a little more interest than we expect?

Primula_Baggins wrote:

These votes will be our initiatives and referenda; might they get a little more interest than we expect?

I would hope so. I can see people not taking tons of interest in the Charter. As important as it is, it's also rather dry. However, since most future votes will arise out of issues the board itself is experiencing, the general membership will probably be both more involved and more interested. We generally get a little over 30% for Charter votes, right? So why not, say, 35% or 40% for more popular issues? Although I admit to being biased here, I don't think that's entirely unrealistic.

Well .... since we don't know what the future will hold, I think a fail-safe option is reasonable. I have to think, though, what it might be.

Let me get the last ratification thread up in the business forum, update the agenda, summarize the inter-relationship between all those issues under Binding Votes/Thread Deletion/Statute of Limitations for this commitee, and then come back to this.

Jn

Thanks to all of you for your willingness to discuss this.

*sigh*
I only wanted to say I'm reading - I actually agree with almost everybody.
I hope it'll be possible to keep people interested in the democratic process, but too many people are content to be ruled, if it saves them the trouble of making up their own minds.

I think 20% of active members should definitely be a minimum, but it's really already too little for my taste.
I think I'd be happy with having the same rates as for binding votes, though. I agree that a rare occasion might get people interested.

What happens if a quorum isn't met in the first place?
It doesn't really mean that something is rejected - is there a re-vote or what?

How about we insert some emergency paragraph:
If the quorum isn't met on two or three subsequent occasions, this article becomes void, and a committee will have to find a new quorum.
A call on the membership will then also be made to remind them of the nature of this board.