Chet,
This is the general issue with voting and obtaining consensus. Depending on the makeup of the TC, you can get into situations where you have members from all over the planet. If the meetings are too infrequent, then it becomes hard for people to regain lost voting rights and hard to get anything done. If you have a monthly meeting that counts for voting rights with weekly design meetings then your monthly meetings become basically briefings with high level concept discussions. This also tends to give you a lot of voters that are not activelyÂinvolved day-2-day, and who may not vote on ballots. If you have weekly or biweekly meetings that count for voting rights, then you naturally limit the voting rights down to basically the design teams or mini-groups of the TC, those individuals that are highly involved and can contribute significant amounts of time. This last option allows a TC to vote and pass concepts quickly and easily, because the design team is generally all in agreement. However, this does not mean there is broad consensus.ÂÂ
SDOs and SSOs have struggled with this forever. Where is the balance and how do you gauge involvement and address objections from consensus if someone is not able to participate every week?
If ballots on work products or elements of work products were more frequent in a TC than that might be the best indicator of involvement and engagement. Then if an individual is willing to voice a yes or no response then there is a level of engagement. If they choose not to vote then they would lose their ability to vote in the next ballot. The problem we are actually trying to solve is making sure that the TC members that are engaged at some level can voice their opinions through a vote. However, if they are not engaged and unwilling to vote, then they should not be able to hold the TC hostage.
Another option is to just give everyone voting rights but get rid of the notions of Full Majority and Super MajorityÂof the entire voting population and make them Full Majority and Super MajorityÂof the votes cast. This way if people do not vote they cannot hold the TC hostage.Â
If it was up to me, I would do the following:
1) All new members of a TC obtain voting rights automatically after they have been a member of the TC for more than a month.
2) A TC member that has lost voting rights can obtain voting rights again by attending any 2 meetings within a 2 month period. The only requirement is meetings must be published via Kavi and must be posted 7 days in advance. But there is no longer meetings that count and do not count forÂvoting rights. A TC meeting becomes a TC meeting. A TC member can also gain voting rights by contributing a new draft document, a proposal for a new work product, comments and suggestions on a work product, etc. Basically, if you are going to participate you can get voting rights. But if you are just going to come and listen and observe, you must attend 2 meetings within a 2 month window.
3) The only way for a TC member to lose voting right is by not voting. If they do not vote on a ballot, then when the ballot closes, they lose their voting rights.ÂÂ
This would tend to work well if ballots become more frequent and easier to open and process.Â
Thanks,
Bret
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