Consensus

Up to Mastodon/Governance

References

• 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

sneakers-the-rat#questions23-02-02 03:11:06

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.