-
-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 64
Meta: Consensus Why?
Why does our group make decisions by consensus? Why not plurality voting? Why not a dictatorship? Consensus takes so much longer.
Just to be clear, it's actually not by a formal definition of consensus that I've found. No votes taken and such.
The bus factor isn't just a problem with code, it's a problem with decision making as well. When the decision maker can't attend, how much gets done? From past experience, not much.
- There should be a decision making process that isn't reliant on one person.
- Each person should feel empowered to be involved in decisions.
- As much as possible, everyone should feel invested in it so that caring about the project also isn't just one person's job.
A democracy decided by plurality voting isn't always faster, since folks have to have their say before the vote anyway. It feels easier to the people that win the vote, but feels bad to those who lose it. If the vote repeatedly goes against a person, they feel shut out. It also doesn't take into account how much a person cares about an outcome.
And how do you hold the vote?
- Explicitly: Ah, that wonderful moment of decision where you raise your hand and avoid eye contact because everyone feels ok about it. We're not human and egos never gets involved.
- Anonymously: Who voted against you? It looked like folks were agreeing. If they didn't like it, why didn't anyone say something?
- Not everyone has to vote - people who don't care about the outcome don't vote.
- Everyone gets 5 votes. They can put from 0 to all of their votes in each option. People who don't care put 0. People who care a whole bunch about one outcome, put all their chips in that basket.
Consensus generally isn't completely comfortable for anyone involved. You work to convince people and end up compromising often. You have to learn to dissent and commit. Where you let go is your decision, though. You all stick with the discomfort till everyone's on board, happily or unhappily. You learn to disagree with people and still move forward. In an analogy to a behavioral economics concept, it might keep things closer to social norms than market norms. If you want to learn to collaborate with people, this can be one of the paths there.
It also means you're an integral part of any decision - if you truly and adamantly disagree, then an action is either hard or impossible to take. Try not to be a blocker on purpose, though. Go into a discussion in good faith.
A note: People giving in because they're just tired of debating doesn't really count as consensus, though it still happens sometimes. Avoid it if possible.
The group is small right now and consensus can work. Also, there haven't been any tight deadlines. We'll have to see what we need to do if circumstances change, but even big groups make many decisions through consensus. I think it's possible because those particular decisions each involve only a small group of people, but that can hold true here as well.
- Wikipedia has an interesting article on more formal types of consensus decision making.