It was a BoF discussion. There were essentially no materials presented; I made a short extemporaneous opening statement, and then opened the floor for discussion, which ensued for about an hour. There may be an audio recording, although if there is I am not aware of it. Sorry.

I don't think there was consensus on anything; there were some strongly held opinions in the room and not all of them were mine. There seemed to be a general feeling that RfA on WP is no longer a consensus mechanism, but instead a supermajority mechanism, and that RfA does not do a very good job of selecting administrators, but also not a very bad one. There was some discussion of alternative mechanisms for consensus building, such as the ASF and another site the name of which eludes me. I think it's better for someone other than myself to try to summarize the points as I was a biased participant rather than an impartial observer. Perhaps Gil Penchina, who graciously moderated the discussion, or one of the observers who was not from enwiki, could provide a better summary than I. Kelly On 8/23/06, Andrew Lih <andrew.lih(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Now I'm confused. Voting definitely doesn't scale. But was Kelly suggesting that the fact that voting doesn't scale has something to do with a claim that consensus decision making doesn't scale?

On 8/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the sense that if you vote on every single issue you wind up with...AfD...an enormous waste of time on the part of everyone.

On 8/23/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the sense that if you vote on every single issue you wind up with...AfD...an enormous waste of time on the part of everyone.

It was a BoF discussion. There were essentially no materials presented; I made a short extemporaneous opening statement, and then opened the floor for discussion, which ensued for about an hour. There may be an audio recording, although if there is I am not aware of it. Sorry. Kelly