Once upon a time when the Burning Man camp I was a member of
was supposedly breaking up, they decided they needed some
way of voting on what would happen with the communal
resources we'd paid for (e.g. our large, semi-useless plastic
geodesic dome).
Unbeknownst to me, one of the gang (an East Bay, Berkeley
area fellow) turned out to be an elections process nerd, and
he talked the guy organizing the vote into going with this
odd-ball system that was intended to be less divisive than
the usual majority-rule stuff, which is the direction that
American knees always tend to jerk, at least when not
goose-stepping.
Now, there is a problem with majority rule voting in social
and/or volunteer situations, which I would guess a lot of you
have run into at some point... say, you're living in a group
house with ten people. If you conduct a vote, and comes in
at 6/4, you could call that a clear mandate, but you're
snubbing a large chunk of the household. If you continue to
call for votes on different issues, it's not unlikely that'll
keep splitting that way with the same people voting in the
same ways... and the four people on the losing end aren't
likely to hang around for very long.
(And then, there's the problem of who gets to state what
precisely is being voted on. "Do we get rid of this ugly
couch?" wins on a tie, but "Do we bring this ugly couch
into the house?" loses on a tie.)
Volunteer organizations -- particularly, idealistic,
left-wing ones -- look at that problem, and conclude that
it's im****tant to come to a consensus on all issues, but
that runs into a similar problem: the incessant talkers
always win, and the people who can't stand the incessant
talking walk.
So, this Burning Man group had settled on a kind of hybrid
system that I'd never seen before, but sort-of understood,
because I was familiar with the problems it was trying to
address: Anyone, at any time could make a proposal and call
for a vote on it, and while voting was in process, people
were allowed to make additional proposals, and call for
votes on those, and they were encouraged to incor****ate
elements of the already made proposals, in an attempt at
winning sup****t of a larger group of people by addressing
all the issues people were concerned about.
Okay, so like I said, I kind of got this, but nearly everyone
else in the group was totally confused by it: "Huh, we're
voting on this *again*? But I thought we'd already voted on
this."
I thought it was all incredibly funny, myself.
(And the "Break-up of Our Camp" was largely illusory: the way
it worked out it was more about chasing a few people out of
the camp that we were a bit tired off -- though come to think
of it, we lost a few really good folks in the process, too --
and re-forming a new camp that looked a lot like the old one.
But now, it's definitively broken up, I would say, for the
rather dull reason that some of the core members have moved
off to the East coast. I'm a bit disappointed, myself,
because last year was plagued with so many insane logistical
screw-ups I was looking forward to eavesdropping on yet
another acrimonious divorce.)
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