[New-imc] blocking proposals

[micmatic]

Hi blue. I think you partly misunderstood me.
First of all, I think Sarsnic's comments were actually going in the 
direction of what I said.

You are perfectly right, decision making by consensus is about 
respecting minority concerns.
That's why we arent utilizing direct democracy where a 51% majority 
count wins the vote.

Efficient consensus works by granting everyone a fundamental right to 
object to majority opinion and by promoting conflict resolution rather 
than competition, that is, to include minority concerns within your 
decision making as well as possible.

However, no minority shall have the privilege to "veto" on consensus, as 
this means a minority would be capable of dictating upon a majority.
Consensus works by promoting a general understanding in a society that 
actual opinions, not votes or quantities of people, are being evaluated 
against one another. Thereby eliminating the need for votes.
Good minority objections are generally just as equal and powerful as any 
other opinion.
Minority opinion can only really be of inferior standing in a society 
which endorses majority rule by valuing opinion not by its actual 
content, but by the number of people behind it.

Introducing votes would corrupt the idea of consensus, as it were no 
longer "opinion vs. opinion" but "majority vs. minority". And because 
the entity of an "opinion value" would be transferred from the actual 
opinion to a body, such as a person or group.
As we know, one person does not equal one opinion. And the fact that 
many people are sharing the same opinion doesn't mean they're right. 
This is why consensus functions as a safeguard against majority rule, 
because it attempts to eliminate the middlemen and places singular 
opinions against one another.

Given this, the "right to vetos" becomes obsolete.

Richard and Toni shall under no circumstances have the right to actually 
"veto" against the majority and dictate their standpoint upon everyone else.
Likewise, their standpoint as a minority shall be respected by allowing 
them to object to decision making and fully explain their motives and 
concerns as equal partners.

We shall consider carefully, and evaluate only the standpoints of the 
two opposing groups themselves, and not prejudice by quantity. That is, 
we shouldn't value the IMC-London collective's standpoint as higher than 
the LWG's, only because their strength in numbers is higher than that of 
Richard and Toni.

The rule-lessness of decision making by consensus was not referring to 
the process of decision making, but to the concept of consensus itself.
Time limits, formal standards etc can of course be applied. But the 
consensus itself remains largely undefined and is measured in how 
"generally agreed to" something is. Not in actual votes or other 
authoritative concepts. Differing between an "objection" and a "block" 
is crucial. The two are not the same. A "block" is a proposal's state 
after having been turned down by general agreement. An "objection" is an 
individual's the formal action of disagreeing with a concept or an idea.

Take care,
marco.


=============================================
blue pi wrote:

Hi,

I think the way Sarsnic put it is absolutely right.

micmatic, I do believe that you are talking about a different concept
of consensus than the one I know of. The whole idea of consensus is
that it is NOT a mayority thing. Even a small minority can raise
objections and can stop a proposal and rightly so. The whole idea is
that minority rights should be respected. And this minority may also
be just one person. Maybe that person has a special position, why he
or she sees things differently (e.g. maybe it's the only working
person among twenty students and therefore objects holding meeting
during the day). Maybe the majority is not as reasonable as you
describe it here. 

What you write about blocks and objections is in fact a discussion
that always comes up in groups with consensus decision making. You
are right, theoretically there should not be a block. However, what
is it if a person keeps objecting? And when do you decide that an
objection is actually a block? I think this differentiaton is in
practice not very usefull.

Why there should not be any rules in consensus decision making I can
not see at all. On the contrary I think concensus only works if there
are clear rules (e.g. we have time frames here, so no one can propose
a new IMC on saturday night, and say it is accepted on sunday
morning, that is a rule, and a really important one). If you think
about it in order to have an effectivly working group on consensus
decision making you usually need a lot more rules than if you are
just making decisions by majority vote. 

So I would like you to reconsider your objection, because it doesn't
really seem to fit what we are doing here. Maybe check out the text
Sarsnic mentioned.

greetings
blue