On Nov 8, 2010, at 7:13 AM, Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet wrote:
Dear Team,
I'd like to collect your views on the aspects of quorum, votes and majority.
The draft "WRT Guidelines" propose:
- Quorum - A majority of the total number of WRT Members constitutes a quorum. Proxy votes shall not count toward the presence of a quorum.
Presumably alternates do not count either?
In principle this is fine for me. Looking at the framework for e.g. the Address council, this very basic requirment is paired up with the Regional Diversity aspect, i.e. majority + all regions being represented.
As we do not have the formal regional diversity in RT4, and neither the requirement, I wonder if there are some other aspects we want to consider. Actually, given *this* group, I would feel more comfortable with something like two thirds, but I can live with 50%+ as well.
With a simple majority quorum, just over 25% of the members of this team would be able to make decisions. That seem quite a distance from consensus; ICANN's "normal" mode of operations.
Getting to the voting stuff:
- Voting [...] Motions that receive a majority of votes cast shall be deemed approved.
Do abstentions count as a vote or not? Before answering consider the following example: 12 members present 6 yes 4 no 2 abstentions How we decide this will determine the outcome of this, and other similar votes.
I read that to say: majority of votes present in the meeting.
I am sort of fine with a suggestion of simple majority, but as we should rather strive to achieve rough consensus, this may be a tad too loose, in particular considering proxy votes. I could easily image a motion to being accepted with far less than 50% of the votes in the team being in favour. I may be missing something here?
Thus I'd like to propose 2 thoughts:
+ a motion passes when it reives a majority of votes present in the team, proxy votes are counted as regular votes, or
+ we keep the very relaxed regime of majority of votes present in the meeting but we either do not count proxy votes for determining majority (making them rather pointless, but still), and/or we restrict the decisions involving proxy votes to motions that have already been proposed, discussed and seconded in a previous meeting; or circulated on the Team's mailing list. (lead-time?)
If we allow proxies, and I'm not certain we should, the second proposal is one I could approve (and have used successfully before).
In the absence of other qualifiers for quorum, my personal preference would be to always determine majority based on the number of votes in the team.
I would be grateful for your thoughts. Wilfried.
In general, I would prefer that we attempt to achieve consensus on all issues. I've worked in a number of groups using this model and when all concerned give their best effort, it works wonderfully. All sides can be heard and it avoids the problem of "small majorities".
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