Wolfram, I was summing up what I perceive as the consensus of the previous discussion, not trying to lobby for or against at this time.

and why, oh why can't I spell consensus??

would be equally annoyed if we reopened the Music thread (which I opposed).

Good point. If we can go back and reconsider our decisions not to do something, logically we might end up reconsidering our decisions to do something.

And, coming in late -- yes, COMM went to the sidebar because it's an archive.

My apologies. I'll delete.

< EDIT > Changed my mind. I'm not going to delete it

Good decision, Gandalfe -- I think it's much better for people to leave their posts up, even if they generated some heat, than it is to delete.

Okay, people, I go away to cook some maple bacon and eat it and play with my idiot cat and what do we do? We start fighting again!! WHAT is with the fighting? Can we PLEASE work on our library voices in this thread?

Okay, consense with me on the procedure we just did. And if it works, we can canonize it into Buffista Law.

1. Person 1 posts in Bureaucracy a formally-phrased proposal 1.

2. Persons 2 through 5 say, "Yes, this proposal 1".

3. Light Bulb is immediately opened for discussion. The midnight after Light Bulb opens is the formal beginning of the 4-day discussion clock. From this point until the discussion clock stops, no other proposals may be formalized. They can be hashed out and maybe even put in queue (?), but not formalized so as not to cause Light Bulb traffic.

4. End of day 4 of discussion. Voting opens for proposal 1. If necessary, proposal 2 may immediately take over Light Bulb, demarcated by someone official marking "Here ends the Light Bulbing of proposal 1. Go vote [link]."

5. Voting results for proposal 1 may come in before the discussion period of proposal 2 is over, under certain circumstances. Therefore, it's a dumb idea to make proposal 2 something contingent on proposal 1, and it's the responsibility of the incredibly brilliant people who read Bureaucracy to notice this before proposal 2 gets to formalization.

(A) Is that what just happened?
(B) Does everybody like that this just happened?
(C) Any suggestions what else should happen instead?

From this point until the discussion clock stops, no other proposals may be formalized. They can be hashed out and maybe even put in queue (?), but not formalized so as not to cause Light Bulb traffic.

For the record I am strongly against this. It puts all other proposals on at least a one week delay if not two, three, four weeks or more. This is a big decision and should not be done by consensus in the span of a few hours on this thread.

Nutty-- this is what I'd like to see happen-- but we voted to continue discussion until the end of the vote so this:

4. End of day 4 of discussion. Voting opens for proposal 1. If necessary, proposal 2 may immediately take over Light Bulb, demarcated by someone official marking "Here ends the Light Bulbing of proposal 1. Go vote [link]."

can't happen. We would have to wait until the end of the vote.

I think the process we had before voting was instituted was valid. But I disagree, in this case with the following:

Betsy's suggestion was IF WAR BREAKS OUT.

NOTHING has changed.

Yes, it has. A very big thing has changed. War has broken out. And all the people who didn't chime in when we first visited this may feel differently now than they did when war was a hypothetical.

If our "wait" and revisit it in 3-6 months thing is going to hold (which we didn't have at the time of the discussion) but our "if something significant changes" is not going to hold for to this decision, does the fact that fewer than 42 people chimed in on the decision carry any weight or not? Frankly, my head is spinning.

Honestly, I think the war thread will get voted down. The proposer can't even get a 4th second. But if he gets it, are we really going to not let him bring it to the discussion thread, because 36 people weighed in, some changed their minds, some got bored and the we talked about the NAFDA threads, had the monkey naming incident and whatever else?

Didn't we vote to close discussions during voting?

[edit: Meaning, why couldn't Lightbulbs have proposal #2 discussion open while proposal #1 is being voted on?]

For the record I am strongly against this. It puts all other proposals on at least a one week delay if not two, three, four weeks or more.

I don't see what the alternative is. I really think that having the discussion thread open for several discussions at once would completely negate the purpose of having a dedicated discussion thread. And I really don't see us having so many decisions that we will end up with a 4-week backlog.