Wrong. Reopening the war thread discussion is a sweeping policy change. Once you do it, it's done. I fully expect that we'll be revisiting the TV thread and the politics thread and whatever else we had decided against in the past three months.

Reluctantly, I have to disagree with this. I don't want to see old decisions revisited either. But wasn't part of the rationale for voting at all that after a vote we could officially call a subject closed? As in "every couple of months someone brings up the politics thread and we have to discuss this again. If we voted and it lost, no one could bring it up again for six months." I can't fully agree that the fact that we voted to vote means that these subjects are now closed.

I hate to even say this, because I don't want to get into this issue again, and I think the war thread idea was discussed and decided and should be a done deal. But I'm not sure closing the issue, or other issues that came up in the past, is the right way to be going about this.

Yes. Propose.

you're making the decision to not revisit old "consensus decisions" by consensus, which is the old way. The new way would be to vote:

Should decisions made previously by consensus be closed or open to voting under the new voting mechanism?

This looked logical to me for a second, but now it doesn't.

All decisions before voting were arrived at by "consensus". The decision that old ones wouldn't be reopened was arrived at by "consensus" too. But the decision to have a vote on future decision-making was arrived at by "consensus" too because that was the only decision we had at the time.

If we go back and revisit all the decisions made BC, we undo all the work we've done on the new system.

ahahahahahahaha

Temporal paradox! Temporal paradox!

And of course Brenda is saying what I was trying to say earlier.

I also asked in BBB if we can creat an HTML page with the voting procedures and a list of votes and dates.

but we never said decisions of the old system could be revisited.

Actually, back in the discussion on whether or not we should have a voting method, this was specifically addressed and agreed (by the buffista version of consensus) that we would NOT revisit any previous decisions.

Also, said in voting thread just before it closed, that 6 months seemed to have the most support, but 3 months and 1 year were also mentioned in regard to closing discussion after a decision had been made.

edit to fix spelling

If we go back and revisit all the decisions made BC, we undo all the work we've done on the new system.

Yeah, and I'll start making re-cock-u-lous proposals like, oh "Natter was decided by con. Let's vote on the Natter need."

I'm with John. Just because the system has changed, doesn't mean that the OLD results are invalid.

I would second a discussion on topic dormancy.

Also, it might be a good idea--for sanity's sake--to make a list of all decisions made during the last six months. If no one else wants to do it, I'll threadsuck and make the list sometime this weekend.

Edit: the purpose of the list would be to track which topics were officially grandfathered in as "closed" topics, and when they'd be open for discussion again.

Temporal paradox! Temporal paradox!

Exactly -- we only took a vote on new decision-making procedures because it was decided by consensus. That decision is now invalid, or revisitable? But it led to the voting system you want to use to start a war thread.

You've just murdered your own grandfather.

PROPOSAL:

When we first started this whole voting thing, our ultimate goal was to be able to close discussions and not have them over and over and over and over....

So I propose that:

After a proposal, discussion and vote, further discussion on this matter should be closed for:

3 months 6 months 1 year

In discussion, I would like to narrow this to 2 choices so we need not get into trying to decide how to vote.