At 07:53 PM 11/22/2006, Jan Kok wrote: >At any rate, it's interesting that engineers and their managers tend >to avoid traditional voting methods for serious decision making.
It's not surprising at all. Small meetings only rarely use formal process. Formal process starts to become important at larger meetings. From the point of view of Robert's Rules, those groups were meeting as a Committee of the Whole, where rules are suspended. And because the goal was consensus, specific voting rules were not very important. If you had gotten seriously bogged down, and there were as many as ten people involved, formal rules might have helped. If you had a hundred people at the meeting, forget about trying to make difficult decisions informally. It can take *far* too long. Twenty can be difficult enough. (I've seen relatively large meetings -- maybe fifty people -- use consensus process, pretty informal. And what was really going on was that there were a few leaders who pretty much decided everything and everyone else went along, and if you actually blocked consensus ... it depended on whether you were one of the leaders or not. If you were a leader, why, of course, you were exercising your rights. If you were not a leader, you could be in trouble. I'm thinking of a nonprofit foundation where some people lived at the facility. And after a certain period, it took a vote to be able to continue to live there. I don't recall the exact rule, but it might have been that anyone could block it. Consensus, after all. So just how willing would you be to exercise your "right" to block consensus?) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
