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Comment by musingsole | Hacker News Reader

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musingsole·

Formal rules provide plausible deniability for bad faith communications.

In the presence of good faith, formal rules aren't needed.

Much like methane and "thou which smelt it", I get very cynical whenever anyone calls for formalization.

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Formal rules are also needed if there is even good faith strong disagreement on an issue, especially if it's a fairly even split. Absent written procedures associated with how decisions are made, people can legitimately disagree on things like voting procedures.

Yes - and voting procedures are a great example. You do not want to be arguing about who is entitled to vote, or the process to be followed, when a highly controversial question is before the group. That guarantees a meta-fight about the rules, because the precise choice of counting rule etc. will benefit one 'side' of the issue. And that leads to (extra) bitterness. Choose a reasonable voting process in advance, then use that. There's no such thing as a perfect process anyway.

The board I'm on used to only allow in-person votes for various good reasons--though we've since changed this for equally good reasons. I remember there was some contentious episode or other where there was an argument along the lines of that, given the importance and disagreement on this important issue, surely we want to allow phone votes/proxies given "Joe" has some family stuff going on and can't make the meeting (hypothetical scenario). But the bylaws were very clear that only in-person votes counted so it was hard for anyone to make the case that this situation warranted bending the rules.

Amending the bylaws is a process that should also be in the bylaws. But normally it takes a 2/3 vote to change, which is the highest bar and therefore would allow whatever motion to also pass.

Bad faith communications are usually better than bad faith utter chaos.

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