"Bernhard R. Link" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > But if there is such an situation and there is heated disagreement > outside of this body, how would having only one side of that in the body > help? That would only make a body supposed to defuse such a situation to > be weapon for one side and thus could even rise such a problem to much > higher spheres.
It depends. Being able to reach consensus may make it easier for the soc-ctte to look at the situation and go "there's strong disagreement here and even if we're mostly on one side, we realize that and we should decide that we can't really intervene." I don't know if that's more likely or less likely with a group of people who work well together but may be mostly or entirely on one side of an issue, or with a group of people who are representative but don't work well together. > Thus I think something more proportional is better than something more > cloneful. Unless someone comes up with an idea for a system where anyone > disliked stronly by a reasonable large minority cannot become elected at > all. (and that system is not vulnerable to tactical voting, which I > think it most likely would be as there is no way to let people honestly > distinguish between "I dislike" and "I like the other side better"). Try this reduction of my worry (which may be very unlikely): Suppose we have two basic factions in Debian, one that thinks the soc-ctte is a good idea, and one that thinks it's a horrible idea. If you have proportional representation of both sides, that means you should elect a few people to the soc-ctte who think it's a horrible idea and should never do anything. If those people act to represent their constituency, they should try to block any action by the soc-ctte on any topic. What does that do to the relations between people on the soc-ctte and the general group dynamic? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not saying that the above is the specific problem that I'm worried about. It's rather just a useful simple reduction of the sort of conflict that could happen over other things, and since it's so absolute, it's easier to reason about. As mentioned, I'm very leery of this sort of situation for personal reasons and it may be that I'm just way too conservative about not creating these sorts of tensions among working groups. It may just not be a problem. It may be that the people who get elected via whatever means to the soc-ctte will all be people who can get along with others even if they disagree sharply and who know how to keep disagreements from escalating. That would be great. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
