Different kind of votings (Re: Taking a step back)

[wren romano]

Hi all,

I agree with Joachim Breitner. I've worked with a number of groups
with various approaches to collaborative decision making (not just
just those called "voting"); and imo the recent upset has nothing to
do with the "voting" procedure. I'm not saying we shouldn't consider
changes to how we make decisions, just that if/when we do so we should
do so for its own sake.

The problem isn't with "voting" because, as mentioned repeatedly,
we've taken a wide sample of the community and found overwhelming
support for the changes. Given the margin of support, choosing other
approaches to counting up the size of that margin are unlikely to
alter the ordering of "for > against". Given the margin of support,
the only thing which could invert that ordering is if we took specific
individuals (e.g., those who've publicly "resigned") and considered
them to be dictators. Thus, unless the actual proposal is to make
those individuals dictators, their opposition is insufficient to
counter the support from the rest of the community. No matter how much
we dislike the outcomes we got, changing the process of decision
making wouldn't've allowed us to avoid those outcomes (again, unless
we decided to make certain specific individuals into dictators).

The real problem is the growing divide in the community between the
"liberals" vs the "conservatives". We could define these groups as
those who're willing to break things vs want more stability, or as
those who embrace polymorphism vs those who want to minimize mental
type inference, or a few other ways I'm sure. How exactly we define
the groups doesn't much matter imo; the point is: there are two groups
which are growing ever more divergent from one another. Changing how
we make decisions isn't going to reconcile these two groups; so long
as the groups are widely divergent, any decisions made will upset one
or the other. So the real issue at hand is to address the following
two questions:

(1) how can we reconcile the two groups, reducing the distance between
them so as to reduce conflict?
(2) supposing the groups cannot be (sufficiently) reconciled, how do we proceed?

-- 
Live well,
~wren