Anyone who is in the minority tends to feel that the other side is a GangOf14/ActivePosters/SinisterCabal/FakeConsensus.

Uh, no.

I am at some pains to think "Damn, I lost" rather than "They're all bad." (I don't always manage this, but I do try.) In fact, one of the reasons I have become angry at this discussion is the tendency to refer to "unfairness" and "railroading" and "active posters".

Decent, reasonable people can disagree, vehemently. Courteous people can disagree vehemently without casting aspersions on their opponents' reasoning power.

I THINK people think it doesn't count becuase it wasn't actually voted on, just sort of taken as a given.

I think that when changing over we shouldn't have to vote on minutea (sp). Did we vote on whether to use Mr. Poll or In-House? No- we made a logical decision and I think we stilll can.

The only reason I favored opening a war thread discussion was to avoid the last 200 posts. Everyone could have just voted no. Once Betsy made her proposal about the closing of past discussions and Anne planned on Nillying them, I think we should just stop discussing the war thread, see what happens with the LAST TWO Procedural Proposals. regardless of anything else, logic dictates waiting because we really should have the last 2 nails in the procedure before moving on to a vote.

And I am sorry if I come off all procedure loving-- I do think procedure has it's place. I was tired of trying to figure out whether or not the consensus we had was consensused enough to do something.

If we're going to adhere to procedure, then a point of order (whether or not reconsidering a decision is appropriate) should actually be considered before the question it applies to (do we need a war thread)?

The reason "Do we reconsider?" is ahead of "War thread?" in the queue is that it got four seconds more quickly than War Thread. I do believe that it is appropriate to handle the procedural question first in any case, but that's not why it got precedence.

Decent, reasonable people can disagree, vehemently. Courteous people can disagree vehemently without casting aspersions on their opponents' reasoning power.

With very few exceptions, I've found Buffistas on the whole to be wonderful examples of this.

Betsy-- I agree with you. I am not sure if that is clear from above. That was just my personal reason for stopping my thought that we SHOULD consider the war thread discussion.

Is the "do We consider re-voting on past decisions adopted under old Buffista System" discussion/vote next after the current "how long until a proposal can be brought up again"?

Yes, candy.

Good, thanks.

Again, it seems fair to decide whether we are going to reconsider issues that were decided under the consensus system before we actually go back and do that.

I also thought it was fair to use whatever moratorium time we decide on to apply to issues recently decided upon under consensus.

Let me restate something I said earlier in the Do We Vote discussion: Just because we are voting on certain issues now does not mean we are abandoning consenus. I will amend that to note that just because we are voting now does not mean consensus didn't work. ita gave plenty of examples of how we used it to achieve quite a lot.

The reason consensus worked is because folks weren't wed to the idea of getting their way but in making decisions which worked for the most people. You can be sure that deciding to have the F2F on Los Angeles made it impossible for a number of people to attend. But it also made it possible for a lot of people to go who couldn't have gone otherwise. Nobody pitched a tantrum. There was just another agreement to alternate the event from coast to coast (or in the middle) so that other people could have the geographic advantage eventually.

It's about a commitment to fairness, and also wanting what's best for the community. That's not so hard to keep in mind.

Anne, thank you for doing the summary.

In addition to what Hec said, in its purest form, the idea of voting was not to over bureaucratize bureacracy, it was suggested

• So that it would be easier to count whether more people wanted something or not

• So that we could stop bringing up a suggestion that had been repeatedly shot-down, at least for a period of time.

I think we have to remember it wasn't installed as a change in how we do things, as much as it was instituted as a tool to more easily and accurately measure what we do do (as opposed to our current deep doodoo). I still think we can make it our tool rather than our master, if we're willing, and once all this process trivia is nailed down, that's all it has to be. And that's why decisions that have already been made (even in the negative) should be respected for X amount of time.