Re: electing multiple people
Josip Rodin <joy@entuzijast.net> writes:
> On Tue, Oct 09, 2007 at 01:38:26AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Hm, my experience is that this is *way* more important for social
>> groups than it is for technical groups. Now, if one is electing
>> essentially a legislature, where each member is expected to vote and
>> work independently, it's not as big of a problem. But if the group is
>> ever expected to work by consensus or common ground, this sort of
>> voting system is, IMO, a huge problem.
> I don't get it. Isn't the point of "consensus" to get agreement from an
> entire group, or at least the entire relevant part of the group? If we
> use a voting system that aims to eliminate conflicting options, and
> instead have a small set of compatible options win, then that's not
> really aiming for a consensus, it's just aiming for a majority.
It's not about opinions. It's about people. The problem most often
materializes when there are heated opinions, but the fundamental problem
is when people can't work together with mutual respect. If you end up
with people who intensely dislike each other, the group will have an
exceedingly hard time reaching consensus on anything.
It's one of those sorts of landmine situations where it looks like it
works fine up until the point where there's a major problem that provokes
a lot of heated disagreement, and that's when the body designed to try to
defuse such situations is most vulnerable to a breakdown of civility and
willingness to work together among its members.
One of the things that I find troubling about the idea of the social
committee is that I think it takes the idea of a democratic body and some
vague notions that smart people can work anything out and applies them to
problems that are considerably thornier than the technical problems our
existing example deals with. Constructing organizations that can
effectively deal with social problems is way harder than constructing a
technical committee and I'm worried that insufficient attention is being
paid to some of the fuzzier aspects of how such a group can work together.
Among other things, this is going to be a really crappy job to volunteer
for, and unless there's some feeling that the other members of the
committee "have one's back" so to speak and are willing to put some effort
into presenting a united front, I think you're going to have a really
serious burnout problem.
In the hypothetical case where I were elected to a social committee (very
hypothetical, as I have no intention of running), the first time I felt
like some substantial chunk of the committee hung me out to dry on
something, I'd resign on the spot and that would be the end of that.
I am perhaps excessively wary, having served on the governance boards of
things like Usenet hierarchy administration in the past and having seen
some of the spectacular ways in which this can go wrong. Boards of
directors do do this sort of thing all the time. But they usually don't
have to address quite the same kind of problems.
The degree to which an organization can tolerate people who intensely
dislike each other is, I think, dependent heavily on how much they're
expected to work closely together. Legislatures in governments handle a
spectacular degree of hostility and animosity, but they resolve all issues
by voting and compromise is measured in terms of votes and voting
alliances, definitely *not* consensus. And they frequently just fail to
do something about a problem (and are to some degree designed so that
that's the default behavior). Members of the executive, where most of the
expectation of day-to-day action rests, pretty universally are chosen in
part for their ability to work together rather than be representative of
the whole population.
If this is intended to be more like a legislature where everything is
resolved by voting, maybe this isn't that much of a problem. But see
above about burnout.
I suppose this concern is less relevant if the committee is only supposed
to tackle the issues where there's a reasonably obvious approach backed by
90% of the community, and in places where there are deep divides, it's
expected that the committee won't be able to do anything.
> If the social committee represents only the majority, it instantly loses
> credibility, and in Debian, that would pretty much be its ruin.
I think it depends a lot on what role you expect the committee to take.
If the role of the committee is to serve as peacemaker and facilitator, it
doesn't matter as much whether or not it's representative; it would matter
a great deal more whether the members were people capable of acting in
that role. In other words, to what degree is the committee expected to be
a decision-making body and to what degree is it expected to be a
facilitator?
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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