How many people from each timebank should be on loomio

One thing I'd like to point out is the assumption in some of these comments that decisions will be made by majority-rules voting. I would advise against this. Loomio allows us to develop robust consensus processes, which address any concerns or objections by tweaking or rethinking proposals until unanimity is achieved.

If majority-rules voting is to be used, it's important to define what sort of decisions require a majority. Under what conditions would it be necessary to overrule the objections of a minority? Would they also overrule a group of people who feel strongly enough to block? Also, is a 51% majority enough to overrule the rest of the group? 2/3? 90%? How are majority-rules votes called for, and who gets to vote?

Perhaps different kinds of "decisions" need dfferent polices. Some decisions relate to a real-time event, such as setting the date and location of a hui. For this a definitive decision is required within a specific timeframe, especially by the participants who intend on going.

But other types of "decisions" are open-ended, they reflect a policy or consensus, and these policies and consensus will evolve as the membership evolves over time, They will remain in flux. For these I'd would like to see voting to remain open indefinitely, and members able to recast their votes and change their minds. A histogram or graph could be used to see how the consensus has evolved over its history.

My suggestion:
- that anyone from TBANZ, sufficiently interested in national issues should be able to join the loom.io group and contribute to discussions and vote on some proposals where they are not flagged as binding issues
- for 'binding' issues (where we felt that a decision should be binding on member timebanks) we would agree to restrict it to 'up to x votes from each timebank' (where x is probably 1 or 2)

To pull that off, we would have to do this by informal agreement but in a separate discussion it seems the LoomIO seem to be contemplating the idea of building this into the software.

As regards consensus I think its an important goal that we should reach full consensus on most decisions, which as you say is one of the advantages of the way Loomio is built - so the proposal can be changed and then people can change their 'votes' too. I think however that majority vote is kinda implied by the software though, don't you?

The ability to 'block' is another I think really great and interesting feature of a more consensus decision making process and I think we will all need to learn and discuss how that works. However I'm a bit cautious of being too heavy on the 'process' stuff so early in the piece so I guess I'll leave my thoughts on that for later discussion.

@richardbrown as regards the time limit on proposals I must say it does appear to be an area that needs work. The default is that they 'close' in a few days after you post it - which is not usually what we want, and then also there is a question about 'quorum' for proposals, that is I think we need to agree on what percentage of people need to respond, yes, no, abstain or block before the decision can be considered to be of any use. Few things to work out to be honest ;-) I guess we should just take them one by one. Currently top of the list 'how many people from each timebank'

BTW "blocks are generally used when someone feels so strongly about something that they would leave the group if the proposal was passed."

@richardbrown
The decision about where and when to hold the next hui should be made at the hui. If it needs to be changed, as it was this year, this can be done by consensus, as it was this year.

@milesthompson
"I think however that majority vote is kinda implied by the software though, don't you?"

Not at all. What makes you think that? The software is explicitly designed to facilitate consensus. This is why is says "State your position" instead of "Vote", and there are the usual range of positions used by consensus-based group, instead of the "aye" and "nay" used by majority-rules groups.

Again, I strongly advise against trying to make majority-rules decisions online. If you must make "binding" decisions, I suggest they are made at the hui, not on Loomio.

@milesthompson
"I think we need to agree on what percentage of people need to respond, yes, no, abstain or block before the decision can be considered to be of any use."

I'm not sure there is a useful one-size-fits-all number. The limit of having one proposal at a time in each discussion keeps the number of proposals under control, and in my experience it's usually pretty clear from the discussion thread whether a representative number of people have participated in the discussion.

IMHO the use of subgroups (either one per TimeBank, or as topic-based subcommittees, or both) is the best way to reduce the number of proposals which need input from everyone.