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

[Smith, Bill]

On Nov 8, 2010, at 7:13 AM, Wilfried Woeber, UniVie/ACOnet wrote:

> 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.

Presumably alternates do not count either?

> 
> 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.

With a simple majority quorum, just over 25% of the members of this team would be able to make decisions. That seem quite a distance from consensus; ICANN's "normal" mode of operations.

> 
> 
> Getting to the voting stuff:
> 
> - Voting [...] Motions that receive a majority of votes cast shall be
>  deemed approved.

Do abstentions count as a vote or not? Before answering consider the following example:

12 members present
6 yes
4 no
2 abstentions

How we decide this will determine the outcome of this, and other similar votes.

> 
> 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?)

If we allow proxies, and I'm not certain we should, the second proposal is one I could approve (and have used successfully before).
> 
> 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.

In general, I would prefer that we attempt to achieve consensus on all issues. I've worked in a number of groups using this model and when all concerned give their best effort, it works wonderfully. All sides can be heard and it avoids the problem of "small majorities".

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