[EM] why 0-99 in range voting

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

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?)