Andreas Raab wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
Yes!

Cheers,
Juan Vuletich