Stuart wrote:If the overall size of the Senate is indeed considered to be a problem, then what is the size that does not constitute a problem?
You're doing the same thing as Patrick; dodging the important question and then distracting us with a solution to something that's only relevant if you make a highly dubious assumption.
If that is believed to be an acceptable size, then the problem becomes how to keep it there.
'believed to be' is an obfuscation of 'lets try and placate Bean, Tevar etc without ever forcing them to actually justify themselves. While it's cute that the senate is mimicking an actual political body in this way, it's not something I like seeing on a supposed bastion of rational debate.
Restricting membership of the Senate serves three possible functions. It used to restrict who can discuss board issues. This was already dubious (to the point of serious discussion being forced to Testing) before the HoC was created, and it is completely worthless now. As various senators have recognised, discussion here works at least as well as in the Senate. There is no tidal wave of spam. I would appreciate a customary civility in the HoC equivalent to the usual tone in the Senate, but that is easily implemented. Having a Senate as well as a HoC just means we have duplicate discussion threads on important issues, which aside from being annoying and redundant must look really silly to people external to the board. Finally, if we make the HoC the only forum for board policy and discipline discussion, we can simply slap some very basic posting requirements on it (e.g. 100 posts, three months membership; trivial to code) to block one-shot trolls. Any established members who do troll it should probably be banned from the board, but if you really want, you can just disable their ability to post in the HoC.
So the first purpose is pointless. The second possible purpose is recognising good debaters. The Senate used to be ok for that with the badge and the editing and the regular additions. Now that there are no perks, no recognition and no new admissions, it is utterly worthless in this role. If we are going to do this, we should just have a 'legendary debater' badge that is awarded. Frankly I think we could cut out hassle of a vote thread for every single recipient. It would be better to design a handful of these, and pick someone to award each type at their discretion (e.g. Kuroneko could hand out the 'Master Logician' award, Thanas could hand out the 'Historian' award etc - and of course there would be a 'Colosieum Winner' badge). That way the awards actually say something about the board member (like Wikipedia barnstars, but less spammy). Again, this is trivial to add to the board, if Mike actually approves it.
The only remaining purpose is to restrict who can vote on punishment threads. This is currently irrelevant because the mods aren't paying attention to the Senate, and >95% of mod action occurs without a senate vote. However I agree that
in principle having votes is a good idea, and that
in principle we might want to limit who can vote rather more strictly than who can discuss.
The obvious solution is to use the Senate purely for vote threads, and do all the discussion here. That's a start, though you'll have to get the mods to actually give some sort of guarentee, or at least serious commitment, to paying attention to the results or it will be useless. However I'd note that technically, it's trivial to restrict who can vote in a forum separately from who can post in a forum. So actually we could just have one fourm, combined dicussion/vote threads (I see no point in splitting them, particularly since we can add poll options raised in discussion later), and only a subset of the people who can post able to vote.
So we come to the final question,
if you have acknowledged that the only worthwhile restriction is on who can vote on punishment threads, and
if you have got the mods to agree to wait for and respect the result of such threads (at least half of the time), then who should be allowed to vote? Despite hundreds of posts
no one has yet explained why having lots of people able to vote is a problem. All I have seen is apologetic 'well if we give up trying to get a rationale out of Bean etc, and just treat their irrational notions as requirements...'. Quorum is a meaningless excuse; this isn't a real political body where pushing through votes when all the legislators are away is a problem. The whole concept of 'quorum' is inapplicable, a simple fixed minimum threshold (say, 20) is fine. Having more voters, and a more representative set of voters, can only improve the results by reducing individual bias and unpredictability.
So there is
no rationale for a cap on voter numbers other than reducing 'admin paperwork', and frankly, why does that 'paperwork' even exist? Remove the cap on 'senate' size and the pointless 'quorum' requirement we stop having to care whether people go inactive, or whether they responded to a vote. I've already written code that lists all the people who actually voted, which can either be publicly visible or just visible to an admin person (e.g. Wilkins) - add that to the board and any possible rationale for 'admin paperwork' goes away.
Accepting that there is no sane reason to have a cap, one the legacy nonsense procedures are ditched, there is still the question of how to add people. Continuing to have monthly vote threads is acceptable but strikes me as kind of spammy. I'd suggest two solutions to this;
1) Just make the votes public, so that who voted for what can be plainly seen. Then you don't need to restrict who can vote, because the mods can look at the result and make a personal judgement on which votes are worth counting. That increases the chance of them actually paying attention to votes. Frankly this preference for 'secret votes' strikes me as cowardice anyway; it isn't an admin issue, since manual tallying is unnecessary. Real legislators have to live with their voting record being public knowledge, and rightly so.
However it that won't fly then 2) Use a simple trust scheme. Any three people in the trusted group can agree to add a new person. This works fine for Advogato and various other sites. Again, some simple code modifications can make this easy and transparent; no voting or drama required, but you can trivially check who's authorised and which three people authorised them. There's a small risk of jerks getting added, but who cares? If they do, they can't do any real harm, and their voting privileges can be trivially removed by a mod or a punishment vote.
This is not a country, or even a particularly large message board. There is no reason to be as exclusive as possible. Rather, we should be as
inclusive as we can be without seriously compromising the quality of debate or the fairness of disciplinary proceedings. The mods are already an exclusive, closed group, appropriately scaled to the size of the board; having the Senate just mirror that with twice as many members, zero relevance and 1000% more drama is genuinely stupid.