SUO: Re: Required Participation
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JRS = James R Schoening
JRS, quoting JA:
| Since we are required to participate in ballots
| in order to maintain our membership ...
JRS: I believed we required members to show some form
of participation to become voting members, but we
never really defined what qualifies as participation,
which would be hard. We have not followed through on
what it would take to maintain voting membership, but
we probably need to.
Okay, the last I remember there was something about
being booted back to plebe status if you missed two
votes, but maybe that was just being discussed, not
yet imposed.
At any rate, I am not questioning the wisdom of applying some sort
of peer pressure on people to participate, indeed, that is a part
of my point. A person who responds "abstain" or "present" to
a ballot says that they care enough to be paying a modicum of
attention to the issue in question, and lends the weight of
one voice to whatever the rest decide, but if the result is
the same as if they had not bothered to register concern,
which is what happens when you balance yeas against nays
and forget the overall "measure of sample validity" N,
then this expression of an interest has been ignored,
and the abstainers have thus been disenfranchised.
What if it were 1 yea, 2 nays, and 97 abstains?
Do we really want issues decided by extremists,
who have never been uncertain of their opinion?
Jon Awbrey
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