On Thu, 2009-02-19 at 19:44 -0500, John Cowan wrote: > William D Clinger scripsit: > > > The R6RS process showed little respect for backward > > compatibility and prior art, and needed only a 60% > > supermajority in a single vote to ratify a pair of > > documents. > > "Only"? > > Requiring supermajorities is tantamount to minority rule.
California almost went bust because of the problem you are talking about. That was almost a serious threat to global security and it's because of bugs in the institutional design (a populist ballot initiative imposed the supermajority requirement on the budget process). Formal institutions (like voting rules and requirements) are hard to design. There's no good theory of how to do it. If the next Scheme steering committee really wants to organize, instead of focusing on voting rules: Focus on the practical problem of chartering subcommittees and discussion groups that report back in formal ways, where those reports and the open session transactions of the sub-committees are all transparent. Then we'll all have a better feel for where we are in reality. (But, as I said in the other thread - this thing needs money, imo. Doesn't have to be a huge amount but work is work.) -t _______________________________________________ r6rs-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.r6rs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/r6rs-discuss
