Juan Vuletich wrote:
> This community doesn't even have a consensus on the way to make 
> decisions. These are not my words, but they say what I think: 
> "Historically, decisions have been made by the people screaming the 
> loudest or the longest. We need to work out a way to fix this and to 
> come to a process by which we can make decisions that are acceptable to 
> the community at large." Only when there is a process set up to make 
> decisions, and it is applied to issues like this, you can say there is 
> consensus. This has not happened yet. And I do really hope it will 
> happen this year.

Me too. I'll even go out on a limp here and attempt to make a proposal: 
I think that in most situations both sides of an issue honestly believe 
that their opinion is the majority opinion. And that both sides cannot 
possibly fathom the idea that their view might be a vanishingly small 
minority opinion, where the opposing party pretty much sees that as a given.

So perhaps a starting point is to try to replace screaming with getting 
a better picture about what the opinions on an issue really are. In 
other words, for potentially controversial issues we (the board) could 
organize a poll if there is an actionable proposal on the table. The 
board could then use the result of the poll as a guide to see whether to 
approve the proposal or not.

How do people feel about this? Would this be an acceptable way to come 
to a conclusion? The idea is that someone *will* make a decision (the 
board) but only if there is a concrete proposal on the table which 
necessitates the decision, guided by the community opinion. It doesn't 
mean that all proposals get polled but for the controversial ones I 
think this could really help both sides understand whether or not the 
(mostly silent) majority agrees with them or not.

Cheers,
   - Andreas