I’m sharing this here because I’ve personally felt the SC was too large since the very beginning, and Gabriella did a great job explaining the reasons it’s a problem. Personally I would like for the ballot in this year’s election to include a measure for the SC to be reduced in size and have only 3 new members be elected this year, but such a change requires a supermajority from the existing SC.
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All we need to do is have two trustworthy candidates run on the following platform:
- On the question of whether the constitution should be amended to reduce the size of the SC, they will vote in favor.
- On all other questions, they will abstain.
- If a constitutional amendment is passed to reduce the SC to 5 or fewer individuals, they will resign.
That way (in the tradition of other grand electoral hacks) if the two candidates are elected by the voters, the amendment will be a formality — the de facto size of the SC will already be reduced to 5 by virtue of their presence.
(One-quarter joking?)
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if the two candidates are elected by the voters, the amendment will be a formality — the de facto size of the SC will already be reduced to 5 by virtue of their presence.
The amendment won’t be a formality, because majority for any decisions carrying weight is counted from full size.
(Also note that you need to make sure the rest of the SC is not willing to kick these two as deadweight and run a special election)
Ah, whoops! Okay, then they coordinate: one votes for and the other votes against, on all questions other than reducing the size of the SC.
(That runs into problems if only one is elected. Something something ‘votes with the majority’? Or maybe the one resigns if unpaired?)
Can we amend any promises of resigning and triggering a special election with «resigns, and volunteers for EC in case special election is announced within a month after the first post-resignation SC meeting»?
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I’d rather not impose any additional requirements beyond ‘trustworthy and eligible’ on our noble volunteers, but as the instigator of these shenanigans I will happily precommit to volunteering for the EC should any of this come to pass and it leads directly to needing a special election.
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If the SC size is going to be reduced, now would be the best time to do it: With multiple resignations, we’d still have a regular election resulting in 3 new members right now.
Say we change the SC to 5 before the next election (2026) and nobody resigns: That essentially means, that we’re only going to select a single seat that time. And then we have an odd situation of selecting 1 member every two years, and 4 members every other two years.
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The Steering Committe voted on this proposal, concluding on Sep 15th. The vote was to reduce the SC to 5 seats for the upcomming election.
For: @Gabriella439 @roberth @Ericson2314
Against: @winter @tomberek
Abstain: @jtojnar
The resolution did not pass. The vote to reveal the vote specifics passed with supermajority.
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Maybe a bit off topic, but just a thought I had:
Assuming the majority of the community does want the SC to be reduced to 5 members (or any other amendment to the constitution that the current SC does not approve), and we want to avoid results like this
…under the current system, your suggestion really is one of the only reasonable solutions! And I think that’s for one pretty simple reason: the constitution does not allow for any form of direct democracy in amendments
This can obviously create problems when/if members of the SC take actions that differ from what their voters may have wanted (which we have already seen to an extent), or are in effect making decisions that might give them less power – or in this case, completely removing themself or some of their peers from office in the next election cycle
An aside
For the record, I’m not trying to imply the above is the reasoning for SC members voting against or abstaining for this proposal. I very much believe all of them made this decision based on what they honestly think is best for the future of the community and a functioning SC, and I think that’s evident by them publishing the vote specifics (which was also a direct criticism that @Gabriella439 voiced in her blogpost, so kudos!)
I think a good foundational solution to this, without radically changing how our governance works, would be to introduce a (Direct) Popular Initiative system for constitutional amendments. This would empower “Eligible Voters” to both directly propose and vote on amendments like this, which in turn would help bridge some gaps between what the SC wants and the community. Further, it would also give the community what I think to be a softer, finer grained “check” against the SC, rather than voters only being able to completely replace a SC member, even if it’s over single-policy issues like this
So, if we were to have some kind of coalition going into the election, pushing a singular policy, I really think this might be something to look into instead. Directly giving the community more power over solving these issues would be much easier than repeating these “electoral hacks” each time an issue like this comes up. It targets the roots of the problem rather than only the effects we see here
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As we haven’t had a poll on this topic I think it is fair to say that we just don’t know if this true. Again I would like to propose the thought that there is no such thing as „the voters“ or „the community“.
I would like to propose something different: ask every one running for the SC the question if they are for reducing the number of SC members. Then vote. This should give plenty of possibility to make the change. If the change does not get a majority maybe it is not „the voters are for a change“ but rather different views on the same question as there was in the current SC.
I’m not against a more direct participation but I don’t think the arguments made are convincing in my humble opinion.
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No need to propose, the original post starting this thread already linked to the SC question that covers just that
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That’s why I prefaced the entire post with “Assuming the majority of the community does want the SC to be reduced.” I don’t know if this is true or not; but I think that’s kinda besides the point of what I’m making?
The issue I’m positing isn’t something inherit to the current topic, but (again) any occurrence of SC members actions differing from that of any group of voters’ wishes. IMO, if it’s not happening here at all, it still probably will be eventually, and the current system does not have good ways to handle that
I also don’t think we need a full poll to see that there is at least some disagreement between people who voted for SC members and the eventual actions of those SC members, big and small. Again, the post I linked has many people disagreeing with what an elected member of office did, and at least personally, I know I don’t agree with some of the votes made on this topic
And even if it isn’t a majority (could very well be the case!), I would imagine there is a meaningful number of people who would like to see what the community does think, and take action based on that. Like say we were to make a poll on this topic, and we found a majority did agree with this proposal…what would we be able to do with that? It would be entirely meaningless
But I really just don’t see how it does
Unless you are a single issue voter (which you shouldn’t need to be, and if you do, that is an indicator for problems with the current system) you also need to take into account all of the other policies that a given candidate supports alongside this specific topic. This can leave a lot of people without a candidate that perfectly represents them, which is a bit of an inevitability in a representative democracy, and could be ok if groups of voters had a way to bridge that gap
The only tool they have for this though is the one you’re proposing here: voting for SC members. But due to the problems above, groups of voters may either just have to Deal With It for the sake of supporting candidates with more beliefs that align with their own, or go back to @rhendric’s original suggestion of having single-issue candidates…which I also think is an indicator for something wrong with the current system. Once again, It’s extremely heavy handed, and makes it difficult to sort out any single issue, as voting for SC members is inherently a “big picture” decision
Or at the very least, as someone who generally agrees with some of the SC members but not their decisions here, I find a decent bit of frustration in it 
On global procedural issues I would not recommend underestimating the number of voters (active contributors who voting in the elections after having read the candidate statements, not just the people who went away from the project) with the position of «have not really given it much thought».
BTW if SC refuses or fails to make a policy on a topic but there is a strong enough support among contributors, an RFC can take force without SC action (and politically puts on SC the expectation to explain any changes to the adopted policy afterwards).
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