
Robert's Rules of Order (1876) - jacquesm
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9097/9097.txt
======
roenxi
Gutenberg doesn't include a fairly important piece of context - these are the
practical, battle-tested & known-to-work rules on how to actually run a
democracy with diametrically opposed competing interests.

I'm not sure what the Indian government uses but I suspect Robert's Rules are
state of the art.

Similar to First Past the Post voting where there are probably some easy wins
tweaks that could be made based on the current academic literature - but the
sheer number of popular "sound good, don't work" ideas floating around make
change highly risky because it will have to run the political process and
still be a good idea when it makes it through. In practice everyone wants
their pet topic to be able to bypass normal procedure.

~~~
DennisP
I've been in a lot of well-run Roberts meetings, ranging from a dozen to a
thousand people. People who didn't get their way always felt they'd had a fair
shot at it.

I was also in a "consensus-based" meeting with a couple dozen people. It was
dominated by one person who just kept insisting on getting their way, until
everybody else got tired and "agreed."

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
RRO is used for the US Congress. That may be why it was developed.

It is far from perfect, but I feel it works.

I have been in _many_ RRO meetings, and a few "CBDM" meetings.

I worked for a Japanese corporation for a long time, and saw their consensus
system, which was painful, but worked. It was _completely_ different from the
"CBDM" meetings I've attended.

I once wrote up a very complete presentation and paper on _real_ CBDM, but no
one was ever interested in learning about it.

In my experience, most CBDM meetings aren't actually designed for "consensus."
They are designed to let "the people that matter" accelerate the process of
getting what they want.

~~~
C1sc0cat
I have been to many meetings based on similar principals and am the Chair of
standing orders for a large UK Union

RRO based off us/common practice but Congress, Senate and the House of Commons
do a lot a "naughty shit" that are outside RRO / Citrine.

Amending a motion with non related things should really be ruled out of order.

The "naughty shit" is a direct quote from a former whip.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I was corrected, that the US Congress uses something that is not _exactly_ the
same.

Might be similar for UK Parliament.

But you guys have the most downright _entertaining_ government in the world.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Erskine and May a hard copy of which costs £400

It is online at
[https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/](https://erskinemay.parliament.uk/)

But the executive has far to much power in the UK in my opinion - you can see
why thye went after John Bercow as he was pushing back.

~~~
ChrisMarshallNY
I'll miss him. He was a great Speaker.

------
saurik
Robert's Rules of Order is an incredibly large number of rules that no one
ever fully reads--I seriously ended up buying some physical copies of the book
to bring to meetings to demonstrate to people "you didn't read this (and
neither did I), would you like we both go home and read it and come back, or
can realize we just stop pretending we are following these rules in the first
place?"\--that are largely designed for a use case of running a very very
large meeting (so large that you would rather do anything than separately ask
everyone for their opinion or even their vote on a matter... the "voice vote"
mechanisms are thereby designed to try to shortcut real votes).

I thereby will suggest people take a look at Rosenberg's Rules of Order--which
its author, Judge Dave Rosenberg, subtitles "Simple Rules of Parliamentary
Procedure for the 21st Century"\--which is what many smaller governments in
California have been standardizing on using (and so if nothing else, maybe you
now need to know both, as these are actively being used ;P).

[https://www.cacities.org/Resources/Open-
Government/Rosenberg...](https://www.cacities.org/Resources/Open-
Government/RosenbergText_2011.aspx)

~~~
Fej
Robert's Rules knows that everyone doesn't read all of it - this is why the
chair is given the responsibility of helping members of an assembly formulate
their motions when they aren't sure how to do so. There's even a specific
motion, "parliamentary inquiry", for help understanding the rules.

~~~
saurik
In practice this means that, since no one (including the chair) has read the
rules, people go asking the lawyer (who might remember the rules) or they call
for a staff member who has (hopefully, but probably doesn't) a copy of the
book to sit around and try to dig through and find something related to figure
out the answer to whatever esoteric argument people are having about what
motion can currently be considered and why. Meanwhile, nothing is getting
done, the board is getting bored, and the audience/public has no clue what is
going on but has become increasingly confident that government isn't something
they have any hope of understanding or influencing, and maybe shouldn't even
exist :(.

~~~
dragonwriter
> practice this means that, since no one (including the chair) has read the
> rules,

That's usually not the case, esoteric questions of the rules usually arise
because parties have read the rules and at least one of them thinks they have
found a clever exploit, and at least one disagrees.

> people go asking the lawyer

The _parliamentarian_ , who may or may not be a lawyer (and when they are,
very often so are a lot of the members, and anyhow, while there is a
similarity to the roles, they aren't, at least relevant to the task at hand,
being employed to practice law _per se_ , except to the extent that the body
is one whose rules have legal force.)

~~~
saurik
Most esoteric arguments I have seen end up being where both parties think they
know something about the rules but have different, non-overlapping areas of
the rules they remember (and even then, only vaguely).

Most of the time people stick to some subset of the rules they have seen used
before, but every now and then they get annoyed when someone else seems to be
taking some liberty and they challenge it; at best this is because they have
some vague memory of that being wrong, but more often it is because it feels
like it should be wrong.

(My favorite example of this was one time I saw an eight hour long meeting get
ground to a halt as the chair of a student government asked the supporting
staff member to "do me (her) a solid" and search their old minutes to see what
they did the last time they had this same argument, as they had all determined
later that whatever they had done was wrong.)

On the "parliamentarian"... if you even have a "parliamentarian" (omg lol) you
probably are in the category of group where Robert's Rules of Order might have
even been designed. _Most_ governments (not by area serves but by count; these
are all the small districts and cities) are at most five elected or appointed
board members, and they have access to a city/general manager and _maybe_ (if
they can afford the luxury), a lawyer. (My government decided we can afford
access to a lawyer every other meeting. I have seen many governments that
never have lawyers available during meetings.) The idea that any of the
governments I am a part of would have access to a "parliamentarian" feels just
absurd to me... :(.

("Source": I am an elected government official who was further elected by all
of the local special districts to serve on the meta-government that creates,
modifies, and destroys other governments; and I am further the kind of person
who then--with glee--attended both the big annual conferences for my kind of
government as well as of all of the meta-governments to talk about all of the
different kinds of government ;P. I work with a lot of governments, and I'm
seeing everyone migrating to Rosenberg's Rules of Order.)

~~~
kd5bjo
> Most esoteric arguments I have seen end up being where both parties think
> they know something about the rules but have different, non-overlapping
> areas of the rules they remember (and even then, only vaguely).

In a well-run meeting, this sort of dispute should be dealt with by the chair
simply taking a decision— The chair’s rule is final, unless overturned by an
immediate vote of appeal.

Everything else is about making things go smoothly by setting everyone’s
expectations about what the chair’s rulings will be.

~~~
lazulicurio
> Everything else is about making things go smoothly by setting everyone’s
> expectations about what the chair’s rulings will be.

Exactly this.

And to add on: if the members (in aggregate) do not trust the chair, then it
really doesn't matter what rules you use (or don't use)—you're going to have a
bad time.

For small or less formal organizations, trust in the chair may be all that you
need. For others, condensing those expectations into a set of written rules
helps maintain organizational transparency and coherency.

------
h_spacer
I've been on the board of three community tech orgs (user group, hacker space
and coop).

Each was pathologically mismanaged to the point of embezzlement (literally)
using consensus rules. I managed to force Roberts rules to be adopted in two
of them.

The end result was that the user group that didn't adopt them stagnated and no
new members have stayed for longer than three months in the last 5 years. The
other two grew to the point where they were self sustaining. The coop managed
to negotiate a 50 year lease on a property from the city council at $1 a year,
the hacker space ended up expelling the whole board for mismanagement and
reduced the monthly fees to a quarter of what they were because we were
drowning in cash.

Consensus is a way to run therapy groups, if you want to get anything done
peoples feelings only get in the way.

------
dang
If curious see also

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21157398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21157398)
\- related from last year.

------
specialist
My first exposure to parliamentary procedure was a total mind blow.

Like most of my gamer geek friends, I grew up stubbornly apolitical.

But if we had known about Robert's Rules, we likely would have become junkies.
After all, half the fun of board games is arguing about the rules.

~~~
tialaramex
If you think that's the fun part (lots of people don't) you should look at a
Nomic.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic)

~~~
ColanR
That just sounds like Calvinball.

~~~
tialaramex
It seems unlikely that Calvinball is a nomic. Instead Calvinball appears to be
more like Mornington Crescent, in that players are all participating in
creating a mutually satisfying fiction, Calvinball's fiction looks like a
complicated ballgame, Mornington Crescent more cerebral but since in both
cases there aren't actually any set rules the game is _not_ about changing the
rules. Rosalyn eventually figures out how to play Calvinball well just as
players can get "good" at Mornington Crescent with experience.

~~~
specialist
That's just a terrific tip, you made my morning, thank you.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_\(game\))

------
spinchange
Interesting fella, Henry Martyn Robert:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Martyn_Robert](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Martyn_Robert)

[https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-
Vignette...](https://www.usace.army.mil/About/History/Historical-
Vignettes/General-History/038-Church-Meetings/)

------
pnathan
Rusty's is a simplification of Roberts that some groups use.

I'm very fond of having a well defined organization system that can be
`imported` without having to reinvent the wheel.

------
pyuser583
While RRO is great, it had a wrinkle: it’s a family fiefdom.

The Roberts family has been editing it since “the beginning,” and still do.
Presumably the next editor will be the current editor child.

This presents small problems in terms of continuity.

The real reasons RRO is popular is because RRO is popular. There’s no way to
replace it.

Not a huge problem now, and unlikely to be a huge problem in the future. I’m
not worried, and I don’t think anyone else should be either.

Maybe family fiefdom isn’t always a bad thing?

------
patchtopic
as utilised by Stringer Bell in The Wire

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seemslegit
So... where are the 57 e-parliament startups trying to implement them in web
software ?

------
riffic
note: you don't "make a motion", you _move to_ x.

------
citizenkeen
I used to be a competitive parliamentarian. RRO is amazing in both its
relative simplicity and breadth.

