As a selecting member of the 2015-16 nomcom, I concur with Harald's
general concerns re: voting mechanism and quorum confusion.
On Fri, 28 Aug 2015, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
I suggest changing this to "Once established, the minimum threshold
for changing the procedure is 75% of the selecting volunteers".
Note: The 75% acceptance criterion is new. 75% of the selecting
volunteers is 8 people. That means that 3 people can a) block the
acceptance of any procedure and b) (with my suggested change) prevent
any change to the procedure. We should make sure that's what we want.
The document already allows other rules to be added and presumptively
changed; it should allow the voting mechanism to change, too. If
nothing else, that lets a nomcom replace a
clever-but-too-complicated-to-use mechanism after it realizes the
error of its ways.
Picking the threshhold for change is hard. Using whole numbers rather
than percentages: if 3 out of the 10 selecting members are discontent
with a process, should we allow 7 out of 10 to force it on them? 8
out of 10 agreeing is a high bar, but it means that at most two
selecting members are outliers, which might be a good bar.
I have no strong objections to requiring either 7 of 10 or 8 of 10.
It is not at all clear what a "quorum" does. In our procedures work,
we found that separating out the idea of "meeting quorum" from
"voting quorum" made a lot of sense, espcially since we chose to do
secret ballots only - which means we can't do it in a meeting
anyway, and there was actually no requirement for the members of the
quorum to be present at the same time.
Another way of putting that is: this nomcom added a third kind of
quorum - a quorum for holding a meeting. We did not change the voting
quorum rules; we just added another. I'm not certain a meeting quorum
is necessary as a general thing. Maybe this document should just
remind future nomcoms that they may wish too (and are allowed to) set
a meeting quorum in addition to voting quorums prescribed in this
document.
-- Sam