I never thought much about the Quakers [1] until I read Joseph Reagle‘s excellent new book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (forthcoming from MIT Press in September), in which Joseph references the Quaker consensus decisionmaking processes – and specifically, how Quakers resolve dissent.
Joseph cites the sociological study Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Society of Friends – an exploration of Quaker decisionmaking by Jesuit priest Michael J. Sheeran, who had spent two years observing and interviewing Quakers for his Princeton PhD thesis, which afterwards was published by the Quakers and is now considered a definitive guide on the subject.
Consensus decisionmaking (CDM) is a really interesting topic for Wikimedians because we make most of our decisions by consensus, and we struggle every day with CDM’s inherent limitations. It’s slow and sometimes tedious, it’s messy and vulnerable to disruption, and –most problematically– it’s got a strong built-in bias towards the status quo. CDM creates weird perverse incentives – for example, it gives a lot of power to people who say no, which can make saying no attractive for people who want to be powerful. And it can act to empower people with strong views, regardless of their legitimacy or correctness.
Beyond Majority Rule was so fascinating that it’s sent me on a bit of a Quaker reading binge, and in the past month or so I’ve read about a dozen books and pamphlets on Quaker practices. I’ve been interested to see what values and practices the Quakers and Wikimedians share, and whether there are things the Quakers do, that we might usefully adopt.
For the most part, Quaker practices likely aren’t particularly adaptable for mass collaboration, because they don’t scale easily. They seem best-suited to smallish groups that are able to meet frequently, face-to-face.
But some Quaker practices, I think, are relevant to Wikimedia, and we are either already using versions of them, or should consider it. The Quaker “clerk” role, I think, is very similar to our leadership roles such as board or committee chair. The Quaker decisionmaking process has strong similarities to how our board of trustees makes its decisions, and I think Quaker methods of reconciling dissent might be particularly useful for us. (Quakers have better-codified levels of dissent and paths to resolution than we do — I think we could adopt some of this.) And the Quaker schools’ delineation of roles-and-responsibilities among board, staff and community members, could I think also be a good model for us.
I plan to write more about the Quakers in coming weeks. For now though, here’s a list of what I’ve been reading:
- Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Society of Friends, Michael J. Sheeran
- The Governance Handbook for Friends Schools, Irene McHenry and Ginny Christensen
- Decisions by Consensus: A Study of the Quaker Method, Glenn Bartoo
- Beyond Dilemmas: Quakers Look at Life, S.B. Laughlin
- The Quaker Meeting For Business, Douglas Steere
- Before Business Begins: Notes for Recording Clerks, William Braasch Watson
- Handbook for the Presiding Clerk, David Stanfield
- Clearness Committees and their Use in Personal Discernment, Jan Hoffman
- Creative Listening: Quaker Dialogue, Claremont Monthly Meeting
- Dealing with Difficult Behavior in a Meeting for Worship: Meeting The Needs Of The Many While Responding To The Needs Of The Few, the Ministry and Nurture Committee of Friends General Conference
- Fostering Vital Friends Meetings: A Handbook For Working With Quaker Meetings, Jan Greene and Marty Walton
[1] Quakers have their roots in 17th century England. There are about 360,000 Quakers today, mainly in Africa, the Asia Pacific Region, the UK and North America. Most consider themselves Christians, although a few identify as agnostic, atheistic, or as members of non-Christian faith traditions such as Judaism or Islam. Quakers are probably best known for their belief that the word of God is still emergent rather than fully known, their silent and “unprogrammed” religious services which have no leaders, hymns or incantations, their centuries-old tradition of pacifism and social activism, and their consensus decision-making process.
Sue Gardner's Blog 
as i just mentioned in my blog, in case you want to go a bit astray in your reading list, you might want to go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tsebelis who wrote quite a bit about the power of the one whos says “no”.
Fascinating: thank you southgeist.
By the way, if Google Translate is accurate, in your blog post you describe the Quakers as evangelical. That’s actually not the case — as I understand it, the Quakers pride themselves on NOT evangelizing. They do a little of what they call ‘outreach,’ but I gather it’s more focused on specific issues, e.g., pacifism, more so than recruiting new adherents to the Quaker religion.
“Outreach” is an attempt to turn seekers into finders. I can’t say it more succinctly than that!
I learned about Quaker decision making (and Sheeran) from a Friend colleague at the W3C, and I then put together a little BoF on “non-secular” approaches to group decision making at a conference. When it came to my dissertation, I wanted to do what Sheeran had done both with respect to topic (i.e., consensus) and approach (i.e., historically informed ethnography) as you can see in some of these old blog posts.
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/community/beyond-majority-rule
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/haiku-method
Thanks Joseph. I wonder if you were actually the first to make an explicit connection between Wikimedians and Quakers, then? Maybe you were :-)
If there’s any documentation surviving from your BoF, I’d love to see it. And/or, if you can remember what other non-secular practices you compared us with.
It may not be true for everyone, but myself I find the comparisons with religious traditions really useful. That’s probably because I was raised in the church (my father’s an Anglican minister), which means that –although I’m not religious myself, today– religious language and values and thought processes are generally comfortable and familiar to me.
Yes, we Quakers (at least those of the unprogrammed variety) have been so careful not to proselytize, that we haven’t known how (or even thought) to let others know of our highly inclusive processes for decision-making and other things. Slow and difficult at times, these processes are richer and – for us at least – more satisfying than quicker but cruder vote-taking approaches.
Strong dissent on contentious issues at Quaker meetings for worship for business is not handled uniformly. The tradition varies by time and place, effectively at the discretion of the Clerk. At some meetings, irreconcilable dissent will result in the Clerk declaring that the Meeting is “not of one mind,” and so the issue will be carried forward on the next meeting’s agenda. Less often, dissenter(s) will be declared to be “standing aside,” and majority rule prevails. While rare and usually only occurring after several revisions of the Minute, this prevents the Meeting from being undermined by impostors or newcomers, among other potential degenerate conditions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_Society_of_Friends#Decision_making is currently inaccurate on that point, failing to note the difference between voluntary minuted dissent (where the item is approved but dissenters who allow the Meeting to continue apart from their position are named following the item’s Minute in the Clerk’s Report) and the involuntary standing aside, which may or may not be noted in the Report, and if so, names of those standing aside may or may not be included.
Another omission in that article is that the Clerk is expected to terminate debate — on the rare occasions that people become involved in heated debate — by standing and writing out a minute, revised minute, or making one of the decisions described above.
There are two important differences between consensus as practiced by Quakers and the way consensus is practiced on Wikipedia.
First, when Quakers meet, we meet in person and usually in small groups. Face-to-face and personal interactions are crucial to getting a sense of the meeting, of the room, or of the right. Decisions are also usually made in committees, which meet at a particular time and place, as opposed to in a virtual space where the discussion is left open for days or weeks. The discussions on Wikipedia are not “meetings”, either in the Quaker sense or in the everyday sense of the word.
Second, the fact that Quakerism is a religion is not just a trivial difference. There are theological reasons behind our adoption of it, since one of the things we believe in is that we are all capable of knowing God better if we listen carefully, and our practice is to listen both internally and to one another for “messages”.
Wikipedia’s version of consensus can be informed by Quakerism, but only to a certain degree, since these two elements will always be lacking. In practice, Wikipedia actually works by super-majority of one degree or another, which is certainly more realistic, but sometimes a great deal of confusion is caused by using the term “consensus” to describe the process.
Hi JiffyMan.
Your comments make sense to me.
That’s why I think Quaker decisionmaking practices are probably most applicable to Wikimedians working in small groups — i.e., the Board of Trustees (10 people) and our various committees (e.g., the Wikimania jury, and so forth).
And I agree with you that Quakerism being a religion is a non-trivial difference. I think that, in adopting similar practices, Wikimedia would substitute ‘shared values’ for ‘religious belief’ — but I am sure there would still be an important distinction between the Quaker practice of (as I understand it) attempting to divine God’s will, versus ours of attempting to divine the will of the collective.
I’m definitely not suggesting that Wikimedians should simply adopt Quaker practices. I do think they are worth looking at, and borrowing from where they make sense for us.
Quakers have found the concept of “Servant Leadership” attractive, although it’s not a part of our Faith and Practice.
I would like to add a couple of thoughts to this interesting discussion.
First, Quakers and Quakerism come in several forms these days. There are unprogrammed meetings which focus on expectant waiting in silence for the movement of the Spirit to guide us, individually and collectively – and there are evangelical Quaker churches that look more like other evangelical Christian churches in many ways. Without recounting the origins of this divergence, it is useful to know that both types of Quakers exist (along with a few other smaller variations).
Second, on the matter of Quaker consensus, the nature of its spiritual foundation is crucial. When Quakers gather to make decisions it is often referred to as Meeting for Worship for Business. This serves to remind us that our purpose is not to figure out what WE want to do, but rather how do we discern what GOD wants us to do. We assume that through collectively listening for the voice of the Spirit working in us, we can find our true spiritual direction as a group. One of the keys to this is that we are expected to leave our own egos and personal desires at the door. This is hard enough to do in this small, religious context and much harder to do in any other setting. When we are all being faithful to that intent, we seek to find unity or a ‘sense of the meeting’ as to what we are being led to do. Though it does not prevent ego driven naysayers from obstructing the group, it does help in finding the ‘right’ way forward most of the time.
That all said, I have in fact found important parts of this way of working together to make decisions to apply to experiences in the secular world. One notion is that there is often a ‘third way’ which will best address the situation which can only be found if we listen deeply to all points of view, struggle to understand the concerns of those who have issues with the dominant plan and to see what we could learn that would help create a truly better approach.
I have gone on too long, but I wanted to offer these ideas for your consideration.
While searching for Michael Sheeran’s thesis on Quaker decision-making, I discovered this blog and have enjoyed reading the entries. At first I was concerned because I knew the Quaker methods being described only represented “meeting Quakers.”
David, thank you for introducing the two main branches of Quakers: those that attend traditional, programmed churches and those that attend unprogrammed meetings for worship. The basics of unprogrammed meetings, for me, are the practice of silent meditation at meetings for worship, consensus decision-making and commitment to pacifism.
Perhaps the most famous Quaker in modern times is former president Nixon. Because many people were unaware there were two (primary) branches of Quakerism, a lot of people were confused. He belonged to a programmed Quaker church. Given our country’s expectation that a president be willing to declare war and serve as the military’s Commander in Chief, I think the presidency is out for we meeting Quakers.
Sue, I am impressed with your groups’ struggle to use consensus decision-making and your understanding of its benefits, drawbacks, and the circumstances and practices that might help it to work better. I have witnessed the use of consensus decision-making by small business and communal groups as well as Quakers. It worked well for those who lived together and were willing to meet until consensus was reached, no matter how many hours it took. Business people were more willing to go along with the strong personality (just to get it over with, I think) and could have used some of the Quaker practices James introduced (thank you) and which you were considering. If your work group has adopted any of these additional Quaker practices, I hope you will let us know how they are working for you. Thank you.