request for discussion on improving voting

[David Lang]

I have been saying for a bit that I think the current voting rules allow
significant decisions to be made by too small a group of people. I think it
would be good for HSL if we had more people voting on significant issues.

as a strawman for what a significant issue is, I would say an expense >$1000 or
a change to the bylaws

arguments against changing voting seem to boil down to

1. we've done it this way for a long time

2. if we don't require people to vote in person at a HYH, we won't have people
to clean the lab

3. if someone doesn't rearrange their life to attend the HYH, they don't care
enough about HSL so should have no say in what happens (no matter how much
time/money they spend on the lab outside of the HSL meetings)

I obviously disagree with these three arguments. Improvements always change
things, I don't think we will fail to clean the lab without requring votes to
happen at HYH (most HYH meetings don't have a vote take place anyway), and I
think that work/family/religious obligations should take priority over HSL
obligations.



A few months ago, I threw out three proposals (that were intended to be
discussion starters) earlier, and was told to withdraw them as proposals until
everything was hammered out and there was no 'we could do this or that' type
language in them.

my thoughts are:

1. require that significant proposals get approved by two consecutive HYH
meetings (one thursday, one saturday)

we have different people attending these meetings. When there was a discussion
of cancelling a HYH scheduled for after Christmas, at the thursday meeting the
vote was something like 12-1 to cancel, while at the saturday meeting there was
far more discussion and the vote was something like 5-4.

2. allow in-person voting over a week

objections were that the host would have to check people off a list

3. allow electronic voting

objections were that people who are paying memberships, but not showing up in
the lab would be able to vote, and such people should have no say (because
paying membership is not contributing to the lab)


In my earlier proposals, I went into detail for how I proposed to decide if
enough people had voted to satisfy quorum and other technical details. In this
discussion I'm hoping to first see if enough people agree that it would be
better to have more people vote or not, and if so, talk about options (not just
the three that I listed above), and only later to dive into the details of how
to implement the options.

Thoughts?

David Lang