[Rt4-whois] WT Guidelines - quorum, votes and majority [was: Documents; Shorter mtg in Cartagena]

[Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet]

Dear Team,

I'd like to collect your views on the aspects of quorum, votes and majority.


The draft "WRT Guidelines" propose:

- Quorum  - A majority of the total number of WRT Members constitutes a quorum.
  Proxy votes shall not count toward the presence of a quorum.

In principle this is fine for me. Looking at the framework for e.g. the
Address council, this very basic requirment is paired up with the Regional
Diversity aspect, i.e. majority + all regions being represented.

As we do not have the formal regional diversity in RT4, and neither the
requirement, I wonder if there are some other aspects we want to consider.
Actually, given *this* group, I would feel more comfortable with something
like two thirds, but I can live with 50%+ as well.


Getting to the voting stuff:

- Voting [...] Motions that receive a majority of votes cast shall be
  deemed approved.

I read that to say: majority of votes present in the meeting.

I am sort of fine with a suggestion of simple majority, but as we should
rather strive to achieve rough consensus, this may be a tad too loose, in
particular considering proxy votes. I could easily image a motion to being
accepted with far less than 50% of the votes in the team being in favour.
I may be missing something here?


Thus I'd like to propose 2 thoughts:

+ a motion passes when it reives a majority of votes present in the team,
  proxy votes are counted as regular votes, or

+ we keep the very relaxed regime of majority of votes present in the meeting
  but we either do not count proxy votes for determining majority (making
  them rather pointless, but still), and/or we restrict the decisions involving
  proxy votes to motions that have already been proposed, discussed and seconded
  in a previous meeting; or circulated on the Team's mailing list. (lead-time?)

In the absence of other qualifiers for quorum, my personal preference would be
to always determine majority based on the number of votes in the team.


I would be grateful for your thoughts.
Wilfried.