Tim Starling wrote:
The first and most important measure to improve the
speed of the AC is
to reduce the necessary quorum to three members. Decisions are made by a
simple majority. Any member of the arbitration committee may request a
review of such decisions by the full committee.
How would it be determined which three? Based on the IRC suggestion, it
seems likely that it would be the first three to come along.
Letting the arbitrators divide into three-member panels has been
suggested before, and has some merit to it. In my proposal to reorganize
the Arbitration Committee, I didn't address restructuring the
arbitration process itself because this kind of proposal doesn't need
the election context to happen. This could be implemented now if we want
it, or it could be implemented sometime after the election. Shrinking
the size of the committee, on the other hand, is best accomplished as
part of the election cycle.
The second is that deliberation should be conducted by
IRC, not email.
Cases will still be accepted on the wiki, and findings will still be
announced on the wiki. But deliberations will be performed by any and
all AC members present in #arbcom.wikipedia, as long as there is more
than three of them.
How much deliberation actually occurs via email to begin with? I know
there are several arbitrators who are not big fans of conducting
deliberations in private. Also, human nature being what it is, I'm not
sure how much we can do to move the deliberation process to any
particular forum if it doesn't happen organically. The Arbitration
Committee was given a message board when first set up, which went
nowhere. Nothing is preventing arbitrators from deliberating on IRC now
if they want to, but some of them are not present in that forum.
--Michael Snow