repeated use of voting

[npdoty]

I'm concerned that including multiple voting processes in the sample Community Group charter is encouraging many new groups by default to adopt voting as their decision-making process, and discouraging use of consensus or the W3C Process.

Among the many reasons that Internet standard-setting processes typically don't rely on voting, one is that identifying a closed list of organizations is non-obvious, and this particularly applies to Community Groups where there isn't a W3C Membership requirement. Do we want Community Groups to become frequent calls for "sign up for an account and click join this group just so you can have another vote on this thing"? Another is that stakeholders may not be similarly represented in terms of the number of formal organizations that they have involved.

Also, many groups seem to be copy/pasting the process step of "any 5 organizations at any time can call for a 5-week election". I don't know that this has already been used as a disruptive mechanism, but it seems extremely ripe for it. Since the Community Development Lead is suggested as helping in those cases, maybe it would just be easier to have an appeal to the Community Development Lead possible in cases where the chairs are directly ignoring the consensus of the group to change the chairs.