Consensus
Up to Mastodon/Governance
References
Consensus Guides
Theory
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/seeds-for-change-consensus-decision-making
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/c-t-butler-and-amy-rothstein-on-conflict-and-consensus-a-handbook-on-formal-consensus-decisionm
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-introduction-to-consensus-descision-making
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jan-haverkamp-shared-path-shared-goal
- https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/autumn-brown-the-iambrown-consensus-process-flow-chart
Discord
Ah yes, this is a Consensus thing. I just updated the wiki page to explain a bit better: https://wiki.neuromatch.io/Mastodon/Governance#Voting Yes, you can think of it analogously to a veto. Consensus refers both to making decisions that accommodate the needs of all members as well as consent - you should not be able to be coerced into consent by a bare majority of people. In more intimate consensus processes, a single person might be able to block a proposal. That becomes untenable in larger groups for sort of obvious reasons, hence the design of this governance system to have different proportional thresholds for different types of proposals, as well as division of decisionmaking power between working groups and the general membership.
A block means something different than voting in a few ways, including that blocks should be rare: consensus sort of inverts the decisionmaking process, where care should be taken to discuss with the membership and refine a proposal before, rather than after making the proposal - so in a majoritarian system one might make a proposal and make an argument in favor, people discuss in the comments and then make up their minds there. The purpose of requiring discussion beforehand is to make more space for everyone to craft the proposal in the first place, register concerns, etc. So if people are blocking a proposal, that is a sign that the process has failed (as opposed to in a majoritarian system that the proposal has failed).
Blocking also typically enjoins the person blocking to help remedy the reason for their block: if a proposal is being made in good faith, we assume that it is meeting some unmet need by the proposer/other members. If someone blocks a proposal, that will mean that it might cause them or the organization harm, but those unmet needs still remain - so it's basically like conflict res at that point. Ofc there are exceptions like not making marginalized ppl do additional labor, etc.
Yes! Good question!!!!! Thats one of the basic Consensus questions - good for me vs. Good for the group. Good for both is ideal ofc, but "bad for me, good for the group" is the real meat of the problem. There's a couple of different flavors there. Is bad for me something thats actively bad, something that will have negative felt effects on me, or is it something that just isnt good for me, something I wont feel the positive effects of? Also, is "bad for me" a symptom of "bad for the group" in that the decision is exclusionary/the negative impacts predominately fall on a particular group? In this case, does being able to opt out alleviate concerns you have, or is there something larger you're objecting to beyond that? Few decisions are universally good for everyone, so were your concerns heard and weighed as part of the discussion? How that translates to a vote can be a little tricky/subjective, but in general if there are no active harmful effects, just absence of benefit for you then that would be a vote yes with caveat. Other consensus systems have a "stand aside" which is "if the rest of the group thinks this is good then I'll go with it, but I have some problem with the decision as a whole beyond how it impacts me" where a certain number of stand asides equal a block - doing something everyone feels lukewarm about is not great consensus. We could make abstentions mean that if that makes sense, altho an abstain means something slightly different ("I dont have enough information here but that wasnt the fault of the process" or "this us wholly irrelevant to me" or "I have some conflict of interest"). If you feel like this would have negative impacts on you that you feel like weren't seriously addressed during the discussion, or arent reflected in the outcome, then vote no.
Thats all my interpretation, not gospel or True, and the "meaning of votes" being somewhat up to interpretation and variable between systems is one of the things that makes consensus messy