Last time this was brought up it was pointed out that there were lots of reasons not to discuss it at that time - see here.
The current voting rules are contained within the old site charter, but since we're not planning on including them in the new Site Charter, it's up to us to pass a policy outlining the process for passing new policies at some point.
Obviously we could just continue following the instructions in the "Policy Issues" tab of the old charter, but since we don't do that currently, I think this is a good time to discuss what voting should look like going forward.
The main controversy will likely be over Quorum, hence the title of this post. Currently we need 50% of Active Staff to vote (Yes, No or Abstain) in order for anything major to pass.
The main issue is that less than 50% of staff are actually interested in voting on stuff, so getting anything to pass usually requires us to keep pestering people on Discord or to actually track down the people who haven't voted yet and ask them personally.
There are a few solutions:
- Lower quorum to 30%, as used in many real-world legislative bodies deciding way more important stuff than us. Certain important changes (e.g. site rules, charter) could retain a higher requirement of 50%.
- Have stricter activity rules, listing people who don't vote as Reserve or Inactive.
- Create some opt-out category of staff that are active but not counted for the purpose of quorum.
Alternatively, this isn't actually a problem, status quo is fine. A lot of people don't feel that way, but you're welcome to argue against all of these suggestions if you think they're bad.
We're meant to vote on changes to the charter/rules and "Major website ideas/issues/changes" (also "Minor site ideas/issues/changes", but since that literally just requires 3 people, I've never seen it posted on O5). We should probably define that more specifically if we can.
Currently, we ignore the rule that "Votes should go on for 48 hours" in favour of 5 days to a week - this seems like a reasonable amount of time, if someone would rather engage with policy on their day off then that's perfectly reasonable for a hobby like this. We can do emergency votes in 24 hours, but I've never seen that be used and seems more appropriate for fiat that is justified after the fact. The appropriate time limit will depend on the level of staff participation we expect.
The majority of people that vote must be in favour for it to pass - no complaints there, majority rule seems fine. Probably best to keep it to supermajority for charter changes.
Feel free to discuss any of these issues (support or oppose), or anything else related to the topic of voting.
This discussion will be open for a week.
