Used this in union meetings and Mason meetings. Definitely worth picking up!
A simplified version, Rusty's Rules of Order[0] is used by the IWW. It's worth checking out if you're unfamiliar to Roberts' Rules or need a quick refresher.
Yeah but you’re going to get kicked out if you do that. The rules can definitely be gamed but there is a metagame too which is that the rules can be bent if someone is not acting in good faith.
An alternative approach which I was taught at an enrichment course at school but which became more relevant as life and career progressed - be the minute-taker.
A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."
I think you're thinking of Consensus-Based Decision Making where a minority bloc of 20-33% (depending on the rules of the body) can control the body by refusing to assent.
My introduction to it was from watching The Wire. One of "Stringer's" lieutenants was shown reading a book behind him during meetings. I ended up looking up the book after finally catching the title and thought "hey, this is actually powerful stuff..." What an interesting detail for some already interesting character development.
IMO, American society would benefit from teaching Roberts Rules in high school. Understanding how to have groups come to decisions without forcing consensus a crucial underpinning of society. Side benefit is understanding that when you attack these things, order breaks down.
On a small scale, I’ve found using some of these techniques effective for getting engineering groups to consensus and getting parties who disagree with the decision to have felt heard and ok with the direction agreed upon.
I don't wholly disagree but there are probably far simpler documents one could put together (and I imagine exist) with various voting/notification/debate arrangements most suitable for the given situation. Whenever I've been involved with creating bylaws for an organization, we've tried to be fairly specific about such things. (One thing I definitely learned was that being very informal about most things was fine--until it wasn't.) In the bylaws, we basically invoked Robert's Rules in the vein of--if we didn't think of some situation, use this.
Agree. I’ll admit that, like Agile, I use portions of it as I see fit, not a strict adherence. The core thing I’m thinking of is respect for opposing viewpoints, techniques for debating with people who disagree, and coming to decisions. Debate teams do this, but I think there’s some value in everyone getting a taste of it.
There's probably at least two different aspects. One is how to discuss/debate opposing viewpoints so people at least feel they've had the opportunity to express their opinion and then there's how a decision is actually made. The specifics of which are very important on a board or other structure that is some variant of majority rule.
As a high school student I was in an organization called Future Business Leaders of America, where I competed as a parliamentarian at state and national events.
I use that bit of my high school education more than most of my actual classes.
Yeah, I think there's opportunity to learn about it in most high schools, usually through extra/co-curricular activities like that.
Like someone else mentioned in another comment, I experienced Robert's Rules during speech and debate class when we did model UN.
However, I also got a second dose in a place that might surprise some, Ag classes. Future Farmers if America also uses Roberts Rules for their meetings and competitions.
There are too many subjects ahead of Robert's Rules for me to agree with that statement. Plus there are extra curriculars that do teach it. I mean, it should be taught that parliamentary procedure is literally a thing used by assemblies, but the intricacies of specific rules, outside of use as a broad example, is beyond that scope.
The simplified Roberts rules are pretty simple though.
1. Assume that one person gets to talk at a time. Give them a reasonable time limit to communicate.
2. Different sides take turns in a discussion.
3. Rules for the discussion are under debate, but changing the discussion rules is much more complicated for good reason. Try not to do this unnecessarily, but there are rules for that. There is an arbitrary level of "meta" here, where discussions-about-discussions-about-discussions can arise, and the rules are designed to work under these complex scenarios. But its rare to actually ever need them.
4. Ensure that a quorum has been reached before starting a meeting. If your group is composed of 10 people try to have at least 6 people show up, otherwise its a failed meeting and nothing can possibly get done.
5. After every meeting, send out meeting notes in an email. At the start of every meeting, discuss the previous meetings notes and vote to finalize those notes. Only the written record counts, not people's memories.
6. If an issue is settled / voted upon, do not revisit it until the next meeting (or later).
---------
Its not Roberts rules themselves that are important. Its:
1. The paradigm of having meta-rules, for how to discuss about the discussion. Any conflict will naturally become meta over time, and knowing how to resolve disputes despite a meta-nature is important. (Or at least, knowing that someone 100+ years ago thought of the problem, and there's a set of 100+ year old traditional rules that seem to avoid that problem).
2. Giving everyone a fair turn during the discussion: meeting quorum, alternating discussion points, time limits.
3. Giving forward progress: settling debates, finalizing discussions, etc. etc.
Every aspect of Roberts rules can be voted upon and changed by a group. IE: its the rules of the group that matter, not the rules as written by Robert 100+ years ago.
> IMO, American society would benefit from teaching Roberts Rules in high school. Understanding how to have groups come to decisions without forcing consensus a crucial underpinning of society.
Agree on the value of teaching Roberts rules. While contributing to a consensus-building technology (https://pol.is), I ended up on a call with a historian of Roberts Rules. He made the really memorable observation that Roberts Rules is essentially a social technology for deliberation at scale, which has the important property of preserving and protecting minority voice in consensus processes. It's notable that we now make a lot of things we call "social tech" whose algorithms do no such thing
Roberts Rules has a “bad” side: it’s a family fiefdom run by the Roberts Family.
They have been good caretakers of the tradition. But many good government types take issue with the fact a private family controls the by-laws of so many organizations.
I got to listen to a city attorney go on and on for an hour about how inappropriate it is that city meetings are legally bound to follow the dictats of a family who doesn’t know the city exists.
how is this pronounced?
I once mentioned this in a meeting and got pronunciation nitpicked for allegedly not saying it correctly -
but according to the Oxford dictionary it is pronounced the "obvious" way that I pronounced it:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...
I’ve lived in an English-French community my whole life, and AFAIK, Robert’s Rules are mainly used by English organizations. All French orgs I know of use some variation of the “Code Morin” instead.
I’m francophone and I pronounce “Robert” the English way.
I have definitely never heard anyone pronounce the "Robert" of "Robert's Rules" in the French way. If I encountered that, I would find it abhorrently pretentious.
Good,point about aging into it. When you are younger you don’t care what the neighbors think really, your only social positions that count are amongst your friends and at school so you don’t really grok where Violet is coming from it’s all just boring old people without that.
Just to point out, if you refer to "the Oxford dictionary", people are likely to think you mean the immensely prestigious Oxford English Dictionary, not the completely irrelevant Oxford Learner's Dictionaries.
This book changed my life. Built an entire company (granicus.com) around it and managing government meetings. It helped clerks keep track of where in the process the meeting was, who could do what when, etc.
We use these extensively in dsa meetings, since there’s no strict hierarchy or chain of command (more like, a lot of mutually supportive roles) and a lot of people at meetings. They work well as long as you’re willing to be a bit flexible and everyone is acting in good faith.
Indeed, good faith is the key to these systems. Once you have lost that, it doesn't matter what the scheme is. Even if you have a privilege rule where you can declare someones actions sabotage against the process, it just re-orients the game to applying that sabotage rule against motions you don't like. The rules are the alternative to force, but if someone uses bad faith to jam the rules, then the only recourse becomes force, as the rules don't resist sabotage.
To offer some dissent: I've seen tiny organizations (like 5 people) try to implement this in their meetings, and it's infuriating.
If you have some giant organization where you must implement stuff like this, then fine. If you have a small organization where you don't have to, then meetings should have a facilitator leading the meeting, and then should flow essentially like a conversation.
I was president of the board for a small non-profit organization and somewhat disagree - you probably don't need to enforce all the formality but it's still a good way to make sure things are done in an orderly fashion. Having motions, second and votes is also useful to the board secretary as it's easy to get the important parts in the minutes. I didn't generally hand off the "floor" and I instead let the conversation flow. As a non-profit, some things do require formal votes and tallies.
I'm on the board of a small non-profit and was the chair for a long time. Normally we let discussion flow and there's often consensus at the end or a couple people might mildly disagree about something.
However, we have had situations over the years where it really mattered whether there was quorum, how an emergency meeting could be called, the scope of authority of the executive board, whether phone/write-in/proxy votes counted, etc. Formal procedures often don't matter--but sometimes they do.
IIRC Steven Levy, in his now-dated book 'Hackers', begins with the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, whose members, he wrote, tended to gravitate to one of two groups: those interested in modeling the trains, structures and environment, and those drawn to the track, its signals and controls. One characteristic of the latter group, he says, was taking delight in bringing chaos to meetings through creative use of Robert's Rules.
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.
Even small organizations can benefit from a manageable set of tools. It's just that Robert's is not manageable.
One alternative I've really liked is Cannon's [0]. It's got all the essential elements and clearly explains how to escape the rules and run meetings largely as conversations.
This reminds me of Flight of the Conchords where the manager, Murray, holds meetings in his office with the two band members. He even keeps the minutes himself. Hilarious!
Back in the day I was involved with an anti-apartheid group, one thing we were doing was targeting local companies importing wine from SA, we'd buy shares and attend their AGMs with the intent of gumming up the works so that they couldn't adopt their annual accounts and in turn file their final yearly taxes (this is something that is normally not in shareholders' interest, but it was in ours).
So one of the problems with Robert's (and the way it played into company law in NZ) is that it doesn't fare well faced with recursion .... our game play was roughly:
- someone makes an initial motion - say "I move a motion of no confidence in the chair under the 1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act" - this enrages the Chair, sowing discord, but they have to have a vote, chair steps aside
- I move we hold a written ballot (required if asked for)
- I'd like to nominate X as scrutineer
- Someone else - I'd like to nominate Y
- I move we hold a written vote on scrutineers (now we're off recursion can kick in)
- I'd like to nominate A as scrutineer ...
- Someone else - I'd like to nominate B ....
.... and so on - you get the idea
Now pretty soon we're into silliness, the pompous board of directors running the meeting who always have enough votes to pass anything at an AGM, certainly more than these raucous hippies have .... but they're useless if you can't actually have a vote ...
Eventually the original chairman loses it, gavels the meeting back under his control declares all of the above a pile of rubbish and continues on with the previously carefully scripted AGM without resolving any of this .... but we have him, the accounts are adopted by a chairman who was not the chair, the rest of the meeting is invalid ... next step is to threaten them in court with an injunction freezing the accounts .... their secretary couldn't keep up with all the motions, we had a recording ....
Better yet, we had 100 individual shareholders, under NZ law at the time we could call a special general meeting every 6 weeks .....
Needless to say as we started buying shares of the second wine importer, all the rest of the companies stopped importing wine from SA ....
I just had a look, can't find anything about the wine protest - it was 40 years ago, all pre-web, part of a larger anti-apartheid movement in New Zealand - organised by a local group HART who, among other things were targeting NZ imports from SA, people were going into stores and stickering SA products (especially bottles of wine)
The 1981 Springbok was probably the biggest thing that happened - I got arrested for blowing a whistle during a game (seems there's some silly rule that only one person at a rugby game can have a whistle or something, they couldn't find it when I got to the station and I was released without charge)
I went and worked in Silicon Valley a few years later - moved back after 20 years, NZ is a far safer place for kids to be independent teenagers - and was pretty amazed that my son was taught about the '81 tour in high school history - it's not something that's been forgotten here.
A documentary about this would be great. Especially, if it was a series that covered peaceful, disruptive protests over the years. It would be helpful for those wanting to do something similarly effective without the violence and chaos we've seen over the last few years.
I should add that all this meeting-hacking was not my brilliant idea, can't claim any credit I someone else thought this up.
I only realised that we were invoking a form of recursion years later when I was working with a patent attorney on a patent and realised that his patent-english was a sort of programming language in it's own right, with variables and recursion and different meanings for little things like 'or' etc (but, as he explained, not infinite recursion, because that would require infinite dollars to file)
Yup it all happened, I don't think we ever took them to court, we did call one of the 6 weekly followups (it was 6 weeks because the company had to hold a meeting 6 weeks after being notified that 100 shareholders wanted a meeting).
I may not have explained just how red the chair's face went when we moved that motion (there is no "1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act", it was made up for the purpose, we didn't really need a reason to move a motion of no confidence in the chair) - we had all gone in with flowcharts of how we were going to do it written down on paper.
It all happened in the aftermath of the 1981 rugby tour
The company we attacked pushed back pretty hard, we didn't "down" them, we did mess with them a lot, the other companies caved and announced they weren't importing any more SA wine rather than have us show up at their meetings.
Our goal wasn't to "down" any company, it was to isolate the SA apartheid govt, in this case by reducing their trade - we also went after tinned guavas - no one wants to stock tins of stuff that keeps getting opened in the shop and left to go rancid on the shelves
This was in NZ, probably more '82 or '83 - I can't remember the company name, they were based in Christchurch (or at least the AGM was there) - I had my lawyer buy them for me, had to buy a 100 unit packet for ~$100 which was worth a lot more back then, I'd bought a (very!) small cottage by the sea for $8.5k a few years before.
I may not have explained just how red the chair's face went when we moved that motion (there is no "1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act", it was made up for the purpose
Well, wait, doesn't that make the whole exercise fraudulent? Here in the US at least, this tactic would only work once. You'd be faced with charges of disorderly conduct or trespassing the next time you tried citing a nonexistent law, whether you held shares in the company or not.
You might as well just skip the CS theory and call in a bomb threat every time they try to hold a meeting.
The second half of the sentence that you stopped short of quoting in full explains that no reason is required for a motion of no confidence. It was added solely as a prod.
Yeah, I keep forgetting how judges in civil suits, such as the one that would inevitably follow shenanigans like this, are easy to fool by citing technicalities, especially ones that don't exist or that "aren't necessary." My bad.
And the iteration of communism splintering from socialism. To be truthful, this is essentially what the political estate can devolve into at any time, with or without a January insurrection.
If it wasn't the status quo, then the idea of digging finite fuels out of the ground and burning them in significant enough quantities to alter the composition of the atmosphere would be considered radical
Maybe, but how is this relevant? The original discussion featured anti-apartheid activities which were disrupting companies importing wine from South Africa. It had nothing to do with coal or oil.
you'd have to do your research - the law that allowed 100 shareholders order up a special general meeting every days was I'm sure only a NZ thing (and I think I remembering the conservative govt of time changing the law to protect their mates from this loophole). In this case we had to buy min 100 shares each which was about ~NZ$100 at the time - so that's about a $10k investment - we all sent proxies to the organisers - that $100 was worth a lot less by the time we were done, I don't think I ever bothered cashing it up
In the US they're likely to adjourn the first meeting, and hold a second one with riot cops present to threaten anyone who attempts to "disrupt" the meeting by doing anything other than the board's exact agenda.
It is very very very easy to blame the people at the time for creating a system that explicitly oppressed a large portion of the population based on the color of their skin in order to uphold the disgusting and evil ideals of white supremacy.
And you are correct - white people aren't allowed to "protect themselves" by engaging in mass murder, organized oppression, and social violence against black people. Apartheid was and is evil.
So now that the system is actively oppressing, based on the color of their skin, the smallest minority in SA it's better? Whites can't get any job in SA, neither in government nor in private companies. The only option is to "be an entrepreneur" and open your own business. Apartheid literally means separation. Everyone have the right to deal or befriend with anyone they wish, forced multiculturalism is just it, a forced thing. The africanners 50 years ago knew that ending Apartheid would mean their own genocide, but the liberals of the rest of the western world couldn't "accept" such absurd way of thinking. Well, they were right, now the africanners of 2022 have their days numbered, and SA as a whole is becoming just another failed state in Africa.
During Apartheid, the South African state was a disgusting monument to human evil. Go take your genocide apologia somewhere else. I hope you leave this forum and never return.
Did you even read what he wrote? In case it's not clear: The "genocide" you're talking about (which, btw, there was never a genocide that's pure hyperbole) is now happening to white people. If you found the former disgusting, you're forced to find the current state also disgusting.
There is no such 'genocide' against white South Africans, who still enjoy the lowest unemployment rate[0] and highest income levels[1] compared to other racial and ethnic groups.
While life for white South Africans is more difficult than it was during Apartheid, for obvious reasons, and they now have to contend with affirmative action in many jobs and preferential procurement in government tenders, as a group they still have an inherent historical advantage compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the country.
There's a reasonable argument to be made as to whether those redress measures remain valid, fair, economically beneficial, or necessary, but what's entirely unreasonable is to claim that white South Africans today receive anything even resembling the abuse, restrictions, limitations, and indignities experienced by non-white South Africans under Apartheid. They're not at all comparable.
As opposed to what? White rule and most people eating shit and dying. I’d rather eat shit and die while not being a slave.
That being said, I think it’s going to take a few decades but Africa is going to be alright. There are plenty of success stories there and Asia and South America have managed to gradually pull themselves out of the muck that colonialism put them in, Africa will get there too.
You make a fine point... maybe their country did get reduced to a heap of corruption and banditry by a gang of terrorists--but at least the whites aren't in charge!
So the whites were the only ones who managed to keep their house clean--now that they're deposed, what has been gained? What have the blacks accomplished with their autonomy?
that's not really true, white ruled south africa had an illegal immigration problem because conditions in the countries all around them were far worse and many surrounding black peoples wanted to get in to south africa to improve their lives. the conditions were not as black and white as the skin colors were.
I'm not defending apartheid or racism or stripping anybody of political rights, but living in a functional economy beats living in a a nonfunctioning one.
Appears related to concept of “vetocracy“; a term I am neither attached to, nor is likely original, but does help identify characteristics of disfunction within a system:
To a degree, but each wine exporter has a certain degree of capacity to import wine e.g., warehouses, staff, and trucks. This all can be be scaled up, but only after some time has elapsed and additional capital being placed at risk.
It's reasonable to assume that these folks may have significantly reduced NZ's imports of SA wine for at least a while.
In the New Zealand of the early 1980s one couldn't just go and import something you needed a govt import licence, in many cases these had been handed down over generations and the number in any one market were strictly limited.
The conservative govt that had encouraged the whole Springbok tour in 81 also was the same govt that so mismanaged the economy that it fell apart in 84, they were replaced by a left wing govt that brought in free trade and scrapped all these licensed etc (not the usual left/right narrative)
Are there any prospect of continuing such protests? There are still apartheid states companies do business with, to say nothing of other corporate misdeeds.
There is, every so often, that person who shows up with RRoO to a small board meeting. Nonprofits, scaling cos, etc. There always ends up being someone. It can be kinda fun to try to mess with them when they miss something.
Imho, RRO only works well if some additional rules are added, to hold from the outset and throughout the process. As a prototype offering:
1. There must be sufficient representative diversity on the committee.
2. No agent on the committee should be allowed to buy/bribe other agents to form a persistent (all powerful) majority bloc.
3. To combat issues with (2) all such blocs should be (re)considered as reduced to single agents with a single vote.
Imho, the situation (2) seeks to combat can happen in the real world, with clear evidence of agents no longer being independent in any meaningful sense; so additional strong requirements for transparency surrounding a process are needed, maybe enforced in the committee charter.
Ha wow, haven’t looked at that since college. I was in a speech and parliamentary debate society (drinking group with a debate problem 100%) and we actually were pretty strict about RRO. That was half the fun truth be told.
Taught me a lot about procedure and how it can be used as a tool (or a cudgel).
<grumble> The last time I tried to buy a copy of Robert's at a bookshop, I found that now there are several variations of it/them on the shelf. Robert's This, Robert's That. Likewise for Hoyle's. Can't they leave well enough alone ? </grumble>
I keep repeating this everywhere I can because it was such a revelation to me.
For literally all my life, I have thought of group debate as a thing where both sides try to convince the other of their stupidity, and the debate is only resolved when one side gives up.
Then in the middle of a paragraph about something completely different in the condensed version of Robert's Rules, the authors write
> Vigorous debate about the merits of a motion is central to the very idea of a deliberative assembly. When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This is incredibly profound, and it seems like the authors just take it for granted.
You debate something so that everyone has heard the complications considered important by the group. Then when it goes to a vote, each person is able to consider this important information and form a judgment of their own.
In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
> In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
This hits at a key problem in dysfunctional companies ... since there is often no clear "right answer" people will do dysfunctional things like delay decision making until there is a clear, unambiguously best choice (which may never happen) or force through their preference because other, better, choices have trade offs.
Back when I was a product manager, no small part of my job seemed to consist of making a decision--ANY decision--so that things could proceed. Often it fairly obviously didn't matter and, even if it somewhat did, there was often no clear way to inform an optimum answer. (Of course, sometimes there was--but it was probably the minority of the time.)
Also, a prompt decision can also get the team to the point where the decision is proven wrong and one of the other decisions correct or, as is often the case, a separate best option becomes obvious.
> When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This assumes both sides are acting in good faith and share some common goals. If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
And then there is the meta problem, which is that as soon as one side falls into this hole it typically drags the other side down with it.
I find this is more likely as the argument gets more abstract. But when two sides are trying to deal with an aspect of reality that is staring them in the face, it's much easier to get practical.
Yeah, that's what I used to think too. But recent events have falsified that hypothesis. It turns out that people can maintain some shockingly deep disagreement about the nature of reality.
Yes, but the problem with going local is it doesn't handle externalities well, and technology has made the planet a lot smaller than it used to be so these are getting harder to just ignore.
That's not what I'm talking about - by "staring in the face", I mean aspects of reality that are immediate. Which usually means smaller scale. I agree regarding things like climate change, democracy, and viruses though.
You will find that there is a surprising amount of disagreement over what is actually staring you in the face. Some people will insist that (for example) if you just look around you, any sane person will see irrefutable evidence of intelligent design, and that if you think about this logically you will be led inevitably and irrefutably to the conclusion that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, Jesus is coming Real Soon Now (tm), and in the meantime He has sent Donald Trump to deliver the United States of America from commie pinko liberal atheists. And if you don't accept all of that then there is clearly something wrong with you.
There are literally millions if not tens of millions of American voters who at least profess to believe in the substance of what I have just written. Maybe they're all just trolling but I doubt it. I just have a hard time picturing them saying, "Ha ha, April fools! You didn't really think we were serious, did you?"
If the "wrong" side seems malicious and it is clear-cut who is right, the "right" side shouldn't need to abuse debate.
They can go meta and debate the goals first, then use logic to reason what they suggest objectively works. If the "wrong" side is unable to provide equivalent reasoning for their points, then it's obvious?
And if the "right" side is unwilling to go about it systematically and wants to engage in warfare, perhaps that speaks for their confidence in themselves.
There is no right and wrong side here, there is only your side and the other side. Both sides think they are the right side and the other side is the wrong side (obviously).
Debate works when each side thinks that the other side might have something worthwhile to contribute despite being wrong, even if that contribution is nothing more than capitulation. But if the other side is evil (rather than merely wrong) then even capitulation is no longer a viable option because evil cannot be allowed to merely resign and go about its business. Evil must be eliminated.
> There is no right and wrong side here, there is only your side and the other side. Both sides think they are the right side and the other side is the wrong side (obviously).
Obviously. That's why I put them in quotes. I was just following the example in your comment where there is a self-righteous "right" side, and the "wrong" side is wrong from their perspective.
I think the shared goals consensus and the logical reasoning I described is what makes it painfully obvious to wider public if there is true malice. Why not the "right" side use it?
Only if it has been shown in this way that the wrong side is actually wrong, but the imperfections of the system let them act and do evil, then warfare (which is what you seem to be describing, more or less) might be the next step.
What other classification is even a possibility when you paint one side as "evil"?
Whether the evilness of the "wrong" (with quotes) side matches reality or is a product of the non-evil ("right", with quotes) side's fallible model of the world was unclear from your comment, and I left it as such.
It looks like you aren't arguing with my main point, which is applicable to any side that thinks it's "right". I sincerely hope this approach prevails over abusing debate mechanics that you describe.
You are missing my point. Once one side decides the other is evil, it stops being about right and wrong (in the sense of objectively correct or incorrect). Re-read this:
> If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
and pay particular attention to the passage that I highlighted here.
My point it is not an inevitability, if it happens it is at best regrettable and preventable, at worst the self-righteous side is in fact being the evil one by abusing the truth seeking mechanism.
So, kind of like the efficient markets hypothesis, you have to ask "under what conditions will deliberative debate lead to better decisions?" Because sometimes the group makes the wrong decision.
In high school some 30 years ago, I was voted in to student council, and somehow became the parliamentarian (President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, and the lowly Parliamentarian).
Eager to wield the little power I had, I was a stickler for the rules. Until someone made a motion to suspend Robert's Rules of Order for the duration of the meeting, which was quickly seconded and approved with all but one vote.
Separately, I heard a story that in the Midwest, a rich man was ticketed for speeding, and hired a big shot attorney. At the trial, the defense attorney moved that the charges be dismissed. The old judge looked down at the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorney, and the defendant. He then called a vote, which passed 2 to 1 and the charges were dismissed.
Technical people love parliamentary procedure because it notionally resolves messy human deliberation into a linear call stack with system interrupts.
The important thing to understand is that the rules are mainly for exception handling and are borderline irrelevant on the golden path. Most of the time, committees don't even think about the rules because everyone understands motions, seconding, and voting. Groups often operate in de facto ‘suspension of the rules’ and just talk through issues semi-formally until it’s time to take a vote. That’s actually the optimal outcome in most settings.
The true test of the rules is when disagreements arise about the form of debate rather than subject matter. Sometimes there is a legitimate procedural question but often this comes up when the apparent minority decides to start maneuvering because they believe they are going to lose. In the real world, this tends to play out in one of two ways depending on context:
1. This is a highly professional body with a parliamentarian at the meeting (or at least somebody plausible like a general counsel) who can call the balls and strikes, or the chair is—at least in principle—considered competent to rule by enough people present. A ruling is made and the body moves on.
2. This is an amateur body (which includes most government bodies below the state/province level and the vast majority of private committees/panels/boards), in which case people will resolve the issue as humans usually do. Namely, either the meeting will fall apart and be unable to conduct business or the most influential or aggressive parties will win regardless of what the rules say.
"But the body can just resolve everything properly by reading the rules!" -- well, theoretically.
But think back to the last time you played one of those byzantine German board games for the first time. Now imagine that nobody at the table really cares about board games and are not used to reading game rules. Further imagine that some parties are willing to defect from the spirit of the rules in order to raise esoteric legal and procedural objections, waste time, and filibuster outcomes they don’t want.
Real meetings have time limits, and while the U.S. Senate might stay up past midnight occasionally, regular people who have to wake up for work in the morning and who are giving up family time for a thankless volunteer position generally will not tolerate taking 5 hours to unwind the call stack in a hostile proceeding. So again, the loudest and most assertive parties tend to wear everyone else down. In that case the rules are at best useful for establishing in the record that procedure was not followed, which is only really useful if the issue can be escalated to the courts, appealed to a higher body, or revisited in a subsequent session.
Others in the thread have suggested simplified rulesets, and I’ll recommend Rosenberg’s Rules of Order which was designed by an experienced judge specifically for smaller meetings. But the truth is that almost any set of rules will work for amateur bodies if parties operate in good faith, and almost no set of rules will work if not.
I'm building an app that implements RR! It's called Meet Robbie. Check it out: https://meetrobbie.com
I've been working on it for over a year and we plan to release sometime in the next 6 months. We take RR and make it the basis for a meeting operating system. The rules can be adjusted so that you can use a lightweight set of rules if it suits you better, hence the name "Meet Robbie".
Any feedback on the idea is much appreciated. (and sorry for the shameless plug. I can't resist)
Fans of The Wire will of course be reminded of this classic scene where an early 2000s West Baltimore crack gang adopts Rules of Order to lend a professional approach to their meetings:
The Wire also showed the importance of modifying Roberts Rules to meet the needs of a particular organization. In this case, not taking minutes, because they were discussing a criminal conspiracy to buy and sell large quantities of drugs.
For anyone who wants to see large organizations, and governments, move fast and get a lot done, then it is important to recognize how obsolete some of these older systems of voting are. All of the older systems, from before the year 1900, made the assumption that the representatives who voted needed to show up in a physical space. Clearly, if you jettison that assumption, then it is possible to introduce a system that is streamlined and allows for fast action. Further details here:
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 50.5 ms ] threadOnce you master the rules of order, you can declare everybody and anybody else "out of order" to control any formal meeting.
A simplified version, Rusty's Rules of Order[0] is used by the IWW. It's worth checking out if you're unfamiliar to Roberts' Rules or need a quick refresher.
[0] https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rule...
A lesson also learnable from top civil servant (good grief, I sound like a headline writer) Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Prime Minister" (episode "Man Overboard"): "Ah, Prime Minister... It is characteristic of all committee discussions and decisions that every member has a vivid recollection of them and that every member's recollection of them differs violently from every other member's recollection. Consequently we accept the convention that the official decisions are those and only those which have officially recorded in the minutes by the officials, from which it emerges with an elegant inevitability that any decision which has been officially reached will have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials and any decision which is not recorded in the minutes has not been officially reached even if one or more members believe they can recollect it, so in this particular case if the decision had been officially reached it would have been officially recorded in the minutes by the officials. And it isn't so it wasn't."
On a small scale, I’ve found using some of these techniques effective for getting engineering groups to consensus and getting parties who disagree with the decision to have felt heard and ok with the direction agreed upon.
https://libcom.org/article/how-hold-good-meeting-rustys-rule...
I use that bit of my high school education more than most of my actual classes.
Like someone else mentioned in another comment, I experienced Robert's Rules during speech and debate class when we did model UN.
However, I also got a second dose in a place that might surprise some, Ag classes. Future Farmers if America also uses Roberts Rules for their meetings and competitions.
1. Assume that one person gets to talk at a time. Give them a reasonable time limit to communicate.
2. Different sides take turns in a discussion.
3. Rules for the discussion are under debate, but changing the discussion rules is much more complicated for good reason. Try not to do this unnecessarily, but there are rules for that. There is an arbitrary level of "meta" here, where discussions-about-discussions-about-discussions can arise, and the rules are designed to work under these complex scenarios. But its rare to actually ever need them.
4. Ensure that a quorum has been reached before starting a meeting. If your group is composed of 10 people try to have at least 6 people show up, otherwise its a failed meeting and nothing can possibly get done.
5. After every meeting, send out meeting notes in an email. At the start of every meeting, discuss the previous meetings notes and vote to finalize those notes. Only the written record counts, not people's memories.
6. If an issue is settled / voted upon, do not revisit it until the next meeting (or later).
---------
Its not Roberts rules themselves that are important. Its:
1. The paradigm of having meta-rules, for how to discuss about the discussion. Any conflict will naturally become meta over time, and knowing how to resolve disputes despite a meta-nature is important. (Or at least, knowing that someone 100+ years ago thought of the problem, and there's a set of 100+ year old traditional rules that seem to avoid that problem).
2. Giving everyone a fair turn during the discussion: meeting quorum, alternating discussion points, time limits.
3. Giving forward progress: settling debates, finalizing discussions, etc. etc.
Every aspect of Roberts rules can be voted upon and changed by a group. IE: its the rules of the group that matter, not the rules as written by Robert 100+ years ago.
This is a lost art, and so is being able to accept these decisions with out becoming the resistance.
Eventually they browbeat dissent into discontent when they could have had an entire team of "I've been heard and now I support the group"
Agree on the value of teaching Roberts rules. While contributing to a consensus-building technology (https://pol.is), I ended up on a call with a historian of Roberts Rules. He made the really memorable observation that Roberts Rules is essentially a social technology for deliberation at scale, which has the important property of preserving and protecting minority voice in consensus processes. It's notable that we now make a lot of things we call "social tech" whose algorithms do no such thing
They have been good caretakers of the tradition. But many good government types take issue with the fact a private family controls the by-laws of so many organizations.
I got to listen to a city attorney go on and on for an hour about how inappropriate it is that city meetings are legally bound to follow the dictats of a family who doesn’t know the city exists.
But then again, there’s no actual scandal so far.
but the smug pronunciation nitpicker insisted "Robert" was pronounced the French way, i.e. https://www.howtopronounce.com/french/robert
I’m francophone and I pronounce “Robert” the English way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FboWtJiNYro
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Martyn_Robert
Just to point out, if you refer to "the Oxford dictionary", people are likely to think you mean the immensely prestigious Oxford English Dictionary, not the completely irrelevant Oxford Learner's Dictionaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic
If you have some giant organization where you must implement stuff like this, then fine. If you have a small organization where you don't have to, then meetings should have a facilitator leading the meeting, and then should flow essentially like a conversation.
However, we have had situations over the years where it really mattered whether there was quorum, how an emergency meeting could be called, the scope of authority of the executive board, whether phone/write-in/proxy votes counted, etc. Formal procedures often don't matter--but sometimes they do.
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.
One alternative I've really liked is Cannon's [0]. It's got all the essential elements and clearly explains how to escape the rules and run meetings largely as conversations.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Cannons-Concise-Guide-Rules-Order/dp/...
One speaker at time/don't interrupt people.
Decisions are made only after everyone's had the opportunity to discuss/speak
Proposals need to be specific/defined
Majority rule but minority rights.
Robert's Rules of Order (1876) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23688430 - June 2020 (60 comments)
Rethinking Robert's Rules of Order - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21157398 - Oct 2019 (56 comments)
So one of the problems with Robert's (and the way it played into company law in NZ) is that it doesn't fare well faced with recursion .... our game play was roughly:
- someone makes an initial motion - say "I move a motion of no confidence in the chair under the 1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act" - this enrages the Chair, sowing discord, but they have to have a vote, chair steps aside - I move we hold a written ballot (required if asked for) - I'd like to nominate X as scrutineer - Someone else - I'd like to nominate Y - I move we hold a written vote on scrutineers (now we're off recursion can kick in) - I'd like to nominate A as scrutineer ... - Someone else - I'd like to nominate B .... .... and so on - you get the idea
Now pretty soon we're into silliness, the pompous board of directors running the meeting who always have enough votes to pass anything at an AGM, certainly more than these raucous hippies have .... but they're useless if you can't actually have a vote ...
Eventually the original chairman loses it, gavels the meeting back under his control declares all of the above a pile of rubbish and continues on with the previously carefully scripted AGM without resolving any of this .... but we have him, the accounts are adopted by a chairman who was not the chair, the rest of the meeting is invalid ... next step is to threaten them in court with an injunction freezing the accounts .... their secretary couldn't keep up with all the motions, we had a recording ....
Better yet, we had 100 individual shareholders, under NZ law at the time we could call a special general meeting every 6 weeks .....
Needless to say as we started buying shares of the second wine importer, all the rest of the companies stopped importing wine from SA ....
Is there a place on the web folks can read more about your time fighting apartheid?
The 1981 Springbok was probably the biggest thing that happened - I got arrested for blowing a whistle during a game (seems there's some silly rule that only one person at a rugby game can have a whistle or something, they couldn't find it when I got to the station and I was released without charge)
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1981-springbok-tour
I only realised that we were invoking a form of recursion years later when I was working with a patent attorney on a patent and realised that his patent-english was a sort of programming language in it's own right, with variables and recursion and different meanings for little things like 'or' etc (but, as he explained, not infinite recursion, because that would require infinite dollars to file)
LOL that's genius!
I may not have explained just how red the chair's face went when we moved that motion (there is no "1873 Aged and Infirm person's Act", it was made up for the purpose, we didn't really need a reason to move a motion of no confidence in the chair) - we had all gone in with flowcharts of how we were going to do it written down on paper.
It all happened in the aftermath of the 1981 rugby tour
https://nzhistory.govt.nz/culture/1981-springbok-tour
(having said this it was 40 years ago, I may have gotten some minor details wrong - it was however a grand social hack)
Our goal wasn't to "down" any company, it was to isolate the SA apartheid govt, in this case by reducing their trade - we also went after tinned guavas - no one wants to stock tins of stuff that keeps getting opened in the shop and left to go rancid on the shelves
Well, wait, doesn't that make the whole exercise fraudulent? Here in the US at least, this tactic would only work once. You'd be faced with charges of disorderly conduct or trespassing the next time you tried citing a nonexistent law, whether you held shares in the company or not.
You might as well just skip the CS theory and call in a bomb threat every time they try to hold a meeting.
The unsuccessful multicultural countries are worse.
And you are correct - white people aren't allowed to "protect themselves" by engaging in mass murder, organized oppression, and social violence against black people. Apartheid was and is evil.
While life for white South Africans is more difficult than it was during Apartheid, for obvious reasons, and they now have to contend with affirmative action in many jobs and preferential procurement in government tenders, as a group they still have an inherent historical advantage compared to other racial and ethnic groups in the country.
There's a reasonable argument to be made as to whether those redress measures remain valid, fair, economically beneficial, or necessary, but what's entirely unreasonable is to claim that white South Africans today receive anything even resembling the abuse, restrictions, limitations, and indignities experienced by non-white South Africans under Apartheid. They're not at all comparable.
[0] https://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=14606 [1] https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2019-11-18-whi...
Alexa, what is necklacing?
[0] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/specific-country-data#/coun...
I'm also seeing documented cases of hate speech directed at white people in ZAF.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_South_Africa#Racism_...
This is 'new' success I prefer classic success or classical success.
That being said, I think it’s going to take a few decades but Africa is going to be alright. There are plenty of success stories there and Asia and South America have managed to gradually pull themselves out of the muck that colonialism put them in, Africa will get there too.
I'm not defending apartheid or racism or stripping anybody of political rights, but living in a functional economy beats living in a a nonfunctioning one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetocracy
It's reasonable to assume that these folks may have significantly reduced NZ's imports of SA wine for at least a while.
The conservative govt that had encouraged the whole Springbok tour in 81 also was the same govt that so mismanaged the economy that it fell apart in 84, they were replaced by a left wing govt that brought in free trade and scrapped all these licensed etc (not the usual left/right narrative)
1. There must be sufficient representative diversity on the committee.
2. No agent on the committee should be allowed to buy/bribe other agents to form a persistent (all powerful) majority bloc.
3. To combat issues with (2) all such blocs should be (re)considered as reduced to single agents with a single vote.
Imho, the situation (2) seeks to combat can happen in the real world, with clear evidence of agents no longer being independent in any meaningful sense; so additional strong requirements for transparency surrounding a process are needed, maybe enforced in the committee charter.
Taught me a lot about procedure and how it can be used as a tool (or a cudgel).
The spinoffs are either an attempt to dumb it down or a cash grab by Robert's heirs.
For literally all my life, I have thought of group debate as a thing where both sides try to convince the other of their stupidity, and the debate is only resolved when one side gives up.
Then in the middle of a paragraph about something completely different in the condensed version of Robert's Rules, the authors write
> Vigorous debate about the merits of a motion is central to the very idea of a deliberative assembly. When the arguments on all sides are fully aired, the group is most likely to come to a wise decision.
This is incredibly profound, and it seems like the authors just take it for granted.
You debate something so that everyone has heard the complications considered important by the group. Then when it goes to a vote, each person is able to consider this important information and form a judgment of their own.
In a group debate, nobody has to (or even should?) change their minds. It’s okay to have different priorities and think different things are best. Debate is not about admitting fault or changing one’s mind – it’s about informing the rest of the group about which arguments one thinks are salient to the judgment.
This hits at a key problem in dysfunctional companies ... since there is often no clear "right answer" people will do dysfunctional things like delay decision making until there is a clear, unambiguously best choice (which may never happen) or force through their preference because other, better, choices have trade offs.
there's no need or requirement for consensus for the community to move forward; there's only a need to acknowledge that the community must go one.
This assumes both sides are acting in good faith and share some common goals. If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
And then there is the meta problem, which is that as soon as one side falls into this hole it typically drags the other side down with it.
There are literally millions if not tens of millions of American voters who at least profess to believe in the substance of what I have just written. Maybe they're all just trolling but I doubt it. I just have a hard time picturing them saying, "Ha ha, April fools! You didn't really think we were serious, did you?"
They can go meta and debate the goals first, then use logic to reason what they suggest objectively works. If the "wrong" side is unable to provide equivalent reasoning for their points, then it's obvious?
And if the "right" side is unwilling to go about it systematically and wants to engage in warfare, perhaps that speaks for their confidence in themselves.
Debate works when each side thinks that the other side might have something worthwhile to contribute despite being wrong, even if that contribution is nothing more than capitulation. But if the other side is evil (rather than merely wrong) then even capitulation is no longer a viable option because evil cannot be allowed to merely resign and go about its business. Evil must be eliminated.
Obviously. That's why I put them in quotes. I was just following the example in your comment where there is a self-righteous "right" side, and the "wrong" side is wrong from their perspective.
I think the shared goals consensus and the logical reasoning I described is what makes it painfully obvious to wider public if there is true malice. Why not the "right" side use it?
Only if it has been shown in this way that the wrong side is actually wrong, but the imperfections of the system let them act and do evil, then warfare (which is what you seem to be describing, more or less) might be the next step.
No, you weren't. I very deliberately avoided the use of the words "right" and "wrong" to describe the two sides.
Whether the evilness of the "wrong" (with quotes) side matches reality or is a product of the non-evil ("right", with quotes) side's fallible model of the world was unclear from your comment, and I left it as such.
It looks like you aren't arguing with my main point, which is applicable to any side that thinks it's "right". I sincerely hope this approach prevails over abusing debate mechanics that you describe.
> If one side has (say) convinced itself that the the other side is evil and duplicitous then this no longer works because 1) everything the other side says is viewed through the lens of evil and duplicity and 2) this evil and duplicity needs to be combated by any means necessary, up to and including presenting arguments that the first side knows are wrong but which it believes in good faith could allow it to prevail against evil and duplicity.
and pay particular attention to the passage that I highlighted here.
My point it is not an inevitability, if it happens it is at best regrettable and preventable, at worst the self-righteous side is in fact being the evil one by abusing the truth seeking mechanism.
So, kind of like the efficient markets hypothesis, you have to ask "under what conditions will deliberative debate lead to better decisions?" Because sometimes the group makes the wrong decision.
In high school some 30 years ago, I was voted in to student council, and somehow became the parliamentarian (President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, and the lowly Parliamentarian).
Eager to wield the little power I had, I was a stickler for the rules. Until someone made a motion to suspend Robert's Rules of Order for the duration of the meeting, which was quickly seconded and approved with all but one vote.
Separately, I heard a story that in the Midwest, a rich man was ticketed for speeding, and hired a big shot attorney. At the trial, the defense attorney moved that the charges be dismissed. The old judge looked down at the prosecuting attorney, the defense attorney, and the defendant. He then called a vote, which passed 2 to 1 and the charges were dismissed.
The important thing to understand is that the rules are mainly for exception handling and are borderline irrelevant on the golden path. Most of the time, committees don't even think about the rules because everyone understands motions, seconding, and voting. Groups often operate in de facto ‘suspension of the rules’ and just talk through issues semi-formally until it’s time to take a vote. That’s actually the optimal outcome in most settings.
The true test of the rules is when disagreements arise about the form of debate rather than subject matter. Sometimes there is a legitimate procedural question but often this comes up when the apparent minority decides to start maneuvering because they believe they are going to lose. In the real world, this tends to play out in one of two ways depending on context:
1. This is a highly professional body with a parliamentarian at the meeting (or at least somebody plausible like a general counsel) who can call the balls and strikes, or the chair is—at least in principle—considered competent to rule by enough people present. A ruling is made and the body moves on.
2. This is an amateur body (which includes most government bodies below the state/province level and the vast majority of private committees/panels/boards), in which case people will resolve the issue as humans usually do. Namely, either the meeting will fall apart and be unable to conduct business or the most influential or aggressive parties will win regardless of what the rules say.
"But the body can just resolve everything properly by reading the rules!" -- well, theoretically.
But think back to the last time you played one of those byzantine German board games for the first time. Now imagine that nobody at the table really cares about board games and are not used to reading game rules. Further imagine that some parties are willing to defect from the spirit of the rules in order to raise esoteric legal and procedural objections, waste time, and filibuster outcomes they don’t want.
Real meetings have time limits, and while the U.S. Senate might stay up past midnight occasionally, regular people who have to wake up for work in the morning and who are giving up family time for a thankless volunteer position generally will not tolerate taking 5 hours to unwind the call stack in a hostile proceeding. So again, the loudest and most assertive parties tend to wear everyone else down. In that case the rules are at best useful for establishing in the record that procedure was not followed, which is only really useful if the issue can be escalated to the courts, appealed to a higher body, or revisited in a subsequent session.
Others in the thread have suggested simplified rulesets, and I’ll recommend Rosenberg’s Rules of Order which was designed by an experienced judge specifically for smaller meetings. But the truth is that almost any set of rules will work for amateur bodies if parties operate in good faith, and almost no set of rules will work if not.
I've been working on it for over a year and we plan to release sometime in the next 6 months. We take RR and make it the basis for a meeting operating system. The rules can be adjusted so that you can use a lightweight set of rules if it suits you better, hence the name "Meet Robbie".
Any feedback on the idea is much appreciated. (and sorry for the shameless plug. I can't resist)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xO1zxPRRf4g
SHAMROCK: [scribbling on a legal pad] The Roberts Rules say we gotta have minutes for the meeting right? These the minutes.
STRINGER: Is you takin’ notes on a criminal f*** conspiracy?! What the ** is you thinking man?!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/streamlining-the-actual-pro...