Decision-making guide's voting and quorum standard

[afshin]

This PR adds a sentence that updates voting and quorum section of the decision-making guide to indicate that the standards described in the guide should be considered minimum standards for voting and quorum in each council in Project Jupyter.

The background for this change is that in the Executive Council, we recently had a conversation about creating internal EC bylaws (presumably listed on our team compass) that spell out attendance, quorum, and vote passage requirements that are more stringent than those described in the decision-making guide. Our intuition was that this sort of change on a council-by-council basis is compatible with the governance docs, but we didn't find enough in the decision-making guide to support that conclusion.

We decided to add this sentence to clarify.

[vidartf]

I was initially concerned that this could lead to some projects painting themselves into a corner (e.g. by setting strong requirements only for a member going missing meaning it was impossible to fulfill those criteria), but @afshin assured me there were other provisions in the governance that would allow for handling such cases. If I had any suggestions for refinement, it would be to say that changing any such restrictions would only ever need to be decided by these minimum stipulations.

[afshin]

Thanks for the comment, @vidartf! I would suggest that the default voting standard is what's described here so any decision-making body that wishes to change its standards will still initially be passing the change with these minimum standards. Because of this, my intuition is that the change you suggest is perhaps redundant?

[vidartf]

I would suggest that the default voting standard is what's described here so any decision-making body that wishes to change its standards will still initially be passing the change with these minimum standards.

To clarify, my statement wasn't just about the initial standard, but about the changing of the standard after a new standard has been passed. E.g.:

• Using this default quorum standard of a simple majority, a team passes a restriction saying they need a 100% quorum to make decisions.
• Initially this works as expected, but after a while they figure out that it is quite tiring (especially if people take vacation off-grid), so they want to change it to 90%.
• Now they can only change the rule to 90% with a 100% quorum, so if anyone disagrees they now have to stick with 100% no matter what.

My point was to add a qualifier making it explicit that this stronger quorum can never apply to decisions about the quorum standards themselves. However, this does mean that any decision would have a "nuclear option", allowing a simple majority to force it through by first voting to change quorum standard, and then having a vote on the actual decision.

[ivanov]

Seeing a bunch of approvals here, merging as is since it stalled for a bit, and we can always iterate further.