On Monday, December 9, 2002, at 12:00 PM, Raul Miller wrote:
On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 12:35:22AM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote:No decided issues have less than 100 votes.So, suggest go ahead with it: Drop all ocurances of "Q" and quorum fromthe Consitution."Votes have always met quorum" is not the same thing as "quorum is useless".
Agreed. It isn't. But when taken together with the margin we beat the quorum with each time (we didn't even come close to failing quorum when we accidentally doubled the quorum requirement), and the other reasons aj(?) mentioned, it is strong evidence that in the past, the quorum has been of no use. When taken in consideration along with the growing size of the electorate (now close to 1000 developers), it provides good reason to believe the same will hold in the future.
Thrice half the square root (i.e., the quorum formula) of the population of the US (~270mil) is under 25,000. For the entire world, it is under 117,000.
For all we know, one of the reasons we've always had enough votes to meet quorum is because we've always had quorum for each vote.
I believe the above covers this. In addition, I can't think of any evidence to support that hypothesis, or logical reason to suspect it true.
And if [as you imply] we would never fail to meet quorum, it's fairly harmless to leave quorum in the constitution.
Assuming, of course, that there are no harmful side-effects from adding the quorum requirement to the voting method. Also, the same argument would hold for the opposite; there is no harm in removing it either. If there is no harm either way, I'd suggest the simpler method, which is the one without the quorum.