Qualified majority

hi @philippeponge ... the idea is that if anyone doesn't agree, then the group has a problem. Sometimes if there area few no's the group still needs to move forward, but if a significant minority of people thing the group could find a better solution, it's a good sign that you still have work to do together to find it.

hI @alanna Thanks for your nice answer. I agree with you and it's a good way to think.

You know I'm hoping that a Loomio group will help us for citizen decisions with more and more people ;-)
So if some people make a proposition like "the town don't want scrounger" for example, then because this is not respecting a human right, it must be voted by more than 4/5 people.

What do you think about this ?

I think every group, and every situation is different. Software can support the group, but really it's about building a shared culture and understanding about the protocols the group will follow.

Loomio is very useful for making those protocols clear - for example "if a few people disagree, but most people agree, what is the conclusion?" is a question the group will need to ask itself. Often without Loomio, these questions never get clearly answered, and making them explicit is a valuable process for the group to go through.

But ultimately, Loomio will never give the group the answer to what they should do - that will be different for each group. We design Loomio to be flexible so it can work for many types of groups, but also to gently guide groups toward striving for more consensus than "majority rules" that leaves the minority out.

I think this rule may vary, depending on neddings of the group.

The group I'm in, for example - Partido Pirata do Brasil - has a quorum of 20% for simple decisions, and 40% in some important questions (statutes, campaign, etc.).

The percent of approval needed for a proposal to succeed could be configurable in each group, or in each proposal or type of proposal. And the quorum also (in number of members and in % of members).

I guess I feel like these kinds of exact percentage let the group down and keep it from living up to its full potential of collective wisdom. Even if 99 people think something is a good idea and only 1 person comes along and says they disagree, if they are making a very important point no one had thought of before, it would benefit the group a lot to stop and try to come up with a solution that addresses the concern being raised. But if the agreement is that if X% say yes then the group automatically moves on, you'll miss that golden opportunity to stop yourself from making a mistake because only one person realized it in time and no one listened.

Of course, sometimes when almost everyone agrees and a few people aren't on board it is the right thing to just move forward. But putting is an arbitrary % above which it is automatically approved would lead to skipping the all important step of considering that in each case.

Any organisation using Loomio for formal decision-making needs to agree on the rules they want to use for what makes a decision binding. The Pirate Party of NZ has an ongoing thread discussing rules and processes for our use of Loomio:
https://www.loomio.org/d/A0mrXzcH/rules-and-processes-for-our-use-of-loomio

The comments in this thread show, as @alanna says, that this kind of discussion often reveals hidden assumptions and differences of opinion within the group about decision-making protocols. Once we understand each others' assumptions and concerns, we can start moving towards a set of operating rules we can all live with.

I think I'd support Loomio facilitating a process of helping groups make their protocols explicit, and agreed collectively, regardless of what those protocols turn out to be. What sort of feature or process or experience could we design that would help groups to this well, and address the diversity of protocols that groups will want to use?

We could start with simple help pages which give ideas on how to do it

(my comment was an answer to @alanna )

Great idea @quentingrimaud ! Want to write up a draft?

I write quite a bit on this subject in my book, Consensus-Oriented Decision-Making (New Society Publishers, 2011). I like the term “decision rule” to refer to the threshold of agreement needed to finalize a decision (100%, 100% minus 2 votes, various levels of super-majority, or even simple majority). Loomio could be improved so that it allows each group to input its official decision rule.

I think a great first step would be to implement this feature of a simple box that pops up with the group context/description/policies when joining. Then groups could specify this kind of thing if needed.

I think Alanna makes important points about listening and incorporating the views of even small minorities. I think the effort to do this is one of the things that defines a process as “conensus-oriented” rather than adversarial debate. With small, more homogenous groups a 100% decision rule can work to ensure that all voices are included. In larger and more diverse groups, however, the expectation of 100% agreement is unrealistic and can seriously harm the group’s ability to make decisions. When this happens, decision making tends to be removed from the group and placed in the hands of a small subgroup (a steering committee or such). And the effort to include everyone through a 100% decision rule backfires. Each group needs to decide what decision rule will work best for them, based on their size, diversity, connection to each other, commitment to spend time in discussion, skills in reaching agreement, and some other factors. Loomio could accomodate this by allowing groups to post their own decision rule.

True @timhartnett . I only learned after the Occupy Aotearoa camps ended that right from the beginning of Occupy Wall St, a supermajority vote (90% I think) could carry a decision. I wish we'd had such a rule at Occupy Wellington, as we would have avoided situations where obstructive individuals could milk the group for ego gratification by making us pour copious energy and time into convincing them of every detail of a proposal before they would drop their objection.

While the formation of a consensus is always an ideal to be strived for, it terms of practicality it may be slightly too idealistic, particularly when dealing with large numbers or a short time frame.

The bigger the group the less likely it is to have 100% consensus, the quicker the decision needs to be made the less time there is to form a consensus.

I think in this context, it is probably better to leave the methodology up to the group in question to decide. In Loomios early days this is probably best done through a verbal agreement within each group, later, it would be great if Loomio had a customisable vote polling making software. ie; every group could set their own criteria for what passes as 'qualified' and what does not.

Sorry for the double post,

Could it also be useful to 'qualify' individual members? Assuming the group is using a qualified majority.

What I mean is circumstances where individuals have very low or infrequent rates of participation. For qualifying a majority they could become somewhere of a nuisance, however, the group may not want to or may feel it is unfair to exclude them.

As such, it could be useful if they still had all the normal access, but if they had been inactive for, say a month, they would not be counted as 'not voting' but rather just not counted at all in subsequent polls.

If they became active again they once again be counted as a normal member.

Interesting idea @rorytb - I think the issue is not so much activity as stakeholding. There's lots of different reasons different people are the core stakeholders in a given decisions. We'd had lots of times where we've wanted people playing different roles in Loomio discussions - decison-maker (participate in proposals), comments only, read only - and I think we could do a lot to make these settings dynamic to meet various group's needs. It's not always how active someone is - there are lots of criteria people will have for a given decision as to who needs to be included.

@alanna good point, I hadn't thought about it through that context but it makes sense.

So it would it be like groups could set up permission levels? Using your example they would be 'decision-makers', 'those who can comment', and 'read only'?

For some groups that would be a very practical application, however, for a system based around participant democracy I also find it somewhat concerning, as it certainly runs agains the ideal of consensus. If some are excluded from voting and other are excluding from voting of even having a voice, consensus is impossible.

I think it could make Loomio far more viable as a tool for traditional hierarchal structured organisations... but at what cost?

@rorytb even in very strict consensus groups there is a long tradition of working groups being delegated empowerment in certain areas of decision-making and execution (often with a specific mandate, beyond which they come back to the main group for the final decision). In fact, without this kind of conscious, empowered delegation, consensus can't work in practice at any kind of scale above a few people.

Far from undermining consensus, I see Loomio as supporting the practical "concentric circles" of delegation and collaboration by consent that tend to form in healthy, functional groups. "Everyone is involved in everything" is a recipe for disaster and burnout. Right now, Loomio has rudimentary features around this using privacy settings and subgroups, but I'd like to see this much clearer and easy to use and understand. That way, delegation and considered stakeholding can be managed conscientiously and transparently.

A large part of empowered consent is the choice of what not to participate in. Forcing "all or nothing" participation will severely marginalize certain people and privilege those with more time and freedom, or who are simply more stubborn. That's not what you want. What you want is a system of delegation that's fair, clear, and revokable.