[EM] Comments re Robert's Rules of Order

[RLSuter at aol.com]

I will comment one more time in response to Mr. Lomax's
defense of Robert's Rules. At the end of his remarks posted
yesterday, he states (quoting me):

>> The fact that none of them has yet become as widely
>>accepted doesn't mean they aren't better or that they won't
>>someday become more widely accepted than Robert's Rules
>>now are.
>
>The comment is useless unless an alternative to Robert's Rules
>is suggested, which has not happened here.

No, it isn't at all useless, as I'll explain below.

The question I'm concerned about is whether nor not there
are alternatives to Robert's Rules (I'll call them
"Robert's") that would enable people to conduct meetings
more easily and/or efficiently and/or pleasantly and/or
democratically and/or rationally and/or with better and more
enduringly satisfying results. If there are (and I can think
of no way to prove there aren't), who would not want to know
what those alternatives are? The only exceptions I can think
of are people who have vested interests in maintaining the
status quo, such as publishers of various editions of
Robert's and professional parliamentarians who trade their
expertise in Robert's for pay and perhaps amateur
parliamentarians who have invested a great deal of time in
efforts to understand and apply Robert's and perhaps to
defend them against people like me who have the temerity to
question them.

One thing I must ask of Mr. Lomax is whether he is a
professional parliamentarian or a heavily invested amateur.
If so, then he needs to state that up front before making
additional comments. That would at least explain why he has
been so adamantly defensive of Robert's and so unwilling
even to entertain the possibility that there may be better
ways to conduct meetings or that Robert's may have at least
MINOR defects or insufficiencies, owing perhaps to
widespread ignorance about alternative single winner voting
methods (even among professional parliamentarians).

In my view, the single most useful voting method for
choosing from among multiple alternatives in meetings (e.g.,
when and where to have the next meeting) is simple approval
voting. It requires no more time (or very little more) than
plurality voting, and it is arguably a much fairer and more
rational and efficient means for making some kinds of
important decisions than the usual method involving making,
debating, and voting on a series of motions.

The first edition of Robert's was published something like
100 years BEFORE approval voting was invented. Even today,
30 years after that important invention, only a very tiny
fraction of the public even knows about approval voting,
much less is aware of how easy it is to use and the good
reputation it has gained among political scientists who are
knowledgeable about voting methods.

But that is just one of many reasons (again, unless you have
a vested interest in Robert's) for wanting to know whether
Robert's may need major revisions or whether there may be
superior alternatives methods for conducting meetings. One
thing we know is that meetings often go badly or produce bad
results. There are many POSSIBLE reasons, all of which
deserve serious consideration.

One possible reason is that Robert's are often applied
incorrectly by chairs of meetings and other people, as Mr.
Lomax argues. If that's the main reason, then better general
education about meeting conduct and better training of
meeting chairs are needed.

The problem is, education and training take time, so this is
at best only a partial solution. Another good partial
solution might be the development of very simplified meeting
rules that could be learned easily and quickly and used for
meetings in which all or most people lack knowledge of
Robert's. Such simplified rules might be far inferior to
Robert's but also far better than nothing. If so, they
deserve consideration as an alternative that would be
preferable to Robert's in at least some situations.

Another possibility is that Robert's Rules are defective or
inadequate in minor but easily improvable ways. Perhaps all
that is needed is to incorporate recent insights about
voting methods and to make minor modifications of some
rules, such as the rule that prohibits any debate of motions
to end debate and call for a vote on the previous question.
(I would argue that at least one person should be allowed to
speak against a motion to end debate before that motion is
voted on. I would further argue that this revision should be
incorporated into future editions of Robert's so that it has
a chance of becoming a widely accepted practice. Mr. Lomax
and others will no doubt disagree, but certainly it is a
legitimate and not unreasonable proposal.)

A third possibility is that entirely different methods for
conducting meetings would be better than Robert's in at
least some if not most or even all situations. Now Mr. Lomax
thinks that describing this possibility is "useless" unless
I actually propose an alternative method. But that simply
won't do. The universe of possible major alternatives to
Robert's may be very large, and the best possible
alternative may not even have been invented or imagined yet,
or it may have been invented but has not yet received much
publicity.

The problem of searching for better meeting rules and
methods is best understood as a research problem, not an
issue that can hope to be resolved through debates on an
email list. No doubt a lot of research has already been
done, but probably there is much more that could and should
be done. I can easily imagine this becoming the primary
research subject of some social and behavioral scientists,
if it is not already. I am much more interested in finding
out what such researchers have learned than debating
Robert's Rules with diehard defenders of them. At the
same time, if all or most of those researchers agree that
the defenders of Robert's are probably right, I would like
to know that as well.

-Ralph Suter