On Sunday 05 December 2010 09:21:00 Christopher Brannon wrote:

Kaiting Chen writes:

...

Let's take falconindy's vote as an example; at the moment he has seventeen votes for, one vote abstain, and zero votes against. There are thirty Trusted Users in total.

Let us now assume that the remaining twelve Trusted Users are against falconindy becoming a Trusted User. In this case if each of them vote nay, then there will be seventeen votes for, twelve votes against and one vote abstained, which means that falconindy will be accepted as a Trusted User.

However, if these remaining twelve Trusted Users are smart and adamant about their desire to block falconindy's application, they will simply *not vote*.

Yes, and this would be behavior befitting an asshat. The bylaws implicitly assume that we're dealing with intelligent, cooperative, emotionally mature people. This assumption seems valid to me.

Perhaps a quorum should be unnecessary when a clear majority of all TUs have voted for or against a given proposal. 17 of 30 constitute a clear majority. Would this be a reasonable amendment to the bylaws? If so, I'll propose it.

I'd support some kind of reworking of the quorum for TU votes, since as Kaitling points out, missing a meeting due to weather, car problems, etc. doesn't really apply (though a reasonable equivalent might be that someone's Internet connection goes down for a few days without warning.) It seems to me that if we are to basically expect that all TUs engage in all votes, then the assumption is that a fully constituted vote is everyone, not 66%. Therefore, a majority should be counted as a majority of all TUs, not just of those voting. We'd have to ensure though, I think, that a TU that didn't vote on more than n (consecutive?) occasions (possibly with the addition of them not giving a reason for this) triggers a removal process automatically. But, I'd be a little hesitant about having more complex quorum rules (i.e. exactly as Chris suggested). We should probably either get rid of it (in favour of the above higher expectation of participation) or else leave it as it is. Pete.

On Sunday 05 December 2010 23:14:14 Loui Chang wrote:

On Sun 05 Dec 2010 22:52 +0000, Peter Lewis wrote:

...

I'd support some kind of reworking of the quorum for TU votes, since as Kaitling points out, missing a meeting due to weather, car problems, etc. doesn't really apply (though a reasonable equivalent might be that someone's Internet connection goes down for a few days without warning.)

It seems to me that if we are to basically expect that all TUs engage in all votes, then the assumption is that a fully constituted vote is everyone, not 66%. Therefore, a majority should be counted as a majority of all TUs, not just of those voting.

We'd have to ensure though, I think, that a TU that didn't vote on more than n (consecutive?) occasions (possibly with the addition of them not giving a reason for this) triggers a removal process automatically.

But, I'd be a little hesitant about having more complex quorum rules (i.e. exactly as Chris suggested). We should probably either get rid of it (in favour of the above higher expectation of participation) or else leave it as it is.

Well, we don't need to get rid of quorum. We can just raise the needed quorum for the different type of motions which may achieve a better balance.

Yeah, that's fine, I don't feel strongly about how we implement quorum, I just think it should be consistent and encourage everyone to vote. Incidentally, what did you mean by "achieve a better balance"? I also replied to this before seeing the other thread... will head over there now... <whistles>

On Sun 05 Dec 2010 03:35 -0500, Kaiting Chen wrote:

Sorry for all the mail regarding the bylaws but let me take a quick moment to go through one extremely broken case of the current procedure.

Let's take falconindy's vote as an example; at the moment he has seventeen votes for, one vote abstain, and zero votes against. There are thirty Trusted Users in total.

Let us now assume that the remaining twelve Trusted Users are against falconindy becoming a Trusted User. In this case if each of them vote nay, then there will be seventeen votes for, twelve votes against and one vote abstained, which means that falconindy will be accepted as a Trusted User.

However, if these remaining twelve Trusted Users are smart and adamant about their desire to block falconindy's application, they will simply *not vote*. A sixty-six percent quorum requires that at least twenty Trusted Users vote; if quorum is not reached for two consecutive votes the motion fails. Therefore by not voting these twelve Trusted Users will have effectively voted nay, and falconindy's application will not be accepted.

Well, this kind of gives us a mechanism to remove TUs that are actually inactive or uncooperative, but maybe they should automatically be put up for removal after blocking two proposals rather than three. That way it operations would flow better. Either that, or we can make proposals go for three tries to reach quorum. I'd rather go for the time saver hehe.