[wplug-plan] Quorum Conundrum

[Bill Moran]

In response to Patrick Wagstrom <pwagstro at andrew.cmu.edu>:

> The quorum for membership meetings shall be the lesser of:
> 
>      1. the sum of the prescribed size of the Board plus the square root
>         of the total membership, voting and non-voting; or 
>      2. the majority of the total voting membership.
> 
> Right now I believe we have about 80 members, which puts our quorum at
> 14 people.  Yes, 14 people.  We can't get 14 people.  I'd be really
> leery of dropping this requirement any further.

I was pretty heavily involved in the part of the bylaws -- in fact, that
crazy equation was my idea.  Anyone involved in the bylaws rewrite will
remember me putting together a number of charts comparing different
equations.

The upshot of this whole thing was trying to make sure that quorum was low
enough that we could actually _get_ quorum, while making sure it was high
enough that it forced us to have a reasonable representation of the
membership.  Scary balance to try to maintain in a democracy.

Like Patrick, I'm extremely uncomfortable about _lowering_ the quorum
requirements any further.

> As far as online
> voting, it's a good idea, but misses the exchange of ideas that you get
> from real discussion.  It's slow, prone to get lost, and often comes out
> as being unbalanced.  I'm not in favor of it, but you're welcome to
> bring it up at the meeting next Saturday.  This is something we've been
> hammering out for a while and we are certainly open to ideas from other
> folks.

I agree on this point as well.  Notice the number of people who show up
at meetings and don't know what's going on because they haven't read their
email.  It's tough, because there are many of us who _are_ able to
communicate effectively via electronic medium (email/chat).  But even here
at the office, where _everyone_ is tech-savvy, I still find myself sitting
down with people to discuss things verbally at time.

Some questions that illustrate the challenges of online meetings: "how
do you prevent someone who is a fast typist from overwhelming the rest of
the participants?"  "How do you make sure that someone who is a slow typist
is able to get their ideas across?"  "How do you deal with a circumstance
where something is more easily explained by drawing on a chalkboard?"
"how do we take a vote in a manner that insures fairness and reliably
prevents voting fraud?"

These problems aren't impossible to solve, but they do present enough of a
challenge to make IRC look pathetic as a medium.

I do think that we're on the right road, however.  I'd like to see LOTS of
discussion here on the lists prior to topics coming up to vote.  Then, at
meeting time, people have an opportunity to verbally state their opinions
(whether repetitiously, or because they weren't able to do so effectively
online)

-- 
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.