With a simple majority vote, we're already finding it very rare for dismissals to happen.

Given people's voting patterns so far, moving it to some kind of super majority may well change it from rare to effectively impossible.

The point isn't that it should be hard to dismiss people, but rather than it shouldn't be that desirable. So far, the system seems to largely work as intended, not only in the rarity of actual dismissal, but if the constructive and non disruptive behavior of the people who might have been under question but that councils so chose not to dismiss.

We need to account for different mixes of people / motivations in the futrue -- while it's congenial now, it may not always be.

we'd need to decide which way, and how much, the scale is tipped: it takes a super-majority to dismiss, or to retain? I seem to recall that we came up with failure modes both ways?

Important asymmetry that makes me think we've got this very wrong:

In any other group in W3C, one objection is enough to prevent a proposal from becoming a decision, unless the Chair decides to proceed, which implies escalation to Council.

In convening a Council, one objection to the proposal that a particular Council member participates is not nearly enough. The bar is not just "lack of consensus that the individual should participate", it's much much higher in terms of votes against.

The scale should be tipped the other way. It's not only too biased in favour of Council members' participation in the face of objections, but it also reflects on the people who make the decision about where the scales should be be balanced, who are in many cases themselves Council members.

Transparent fairness should be an objective, and we fail to meet it currently. This is exacerbated by the fact that Council deliberations are held in private.

This is effectively a vote on who has a voice -- it's a very different thing. If the bar to disallowing someone from a Council is too low, that can be manipulated -- e.g., by a faction that wants to see a particular outcome.

Having as diverse as possible of a pool of voters is the best way to counter individual bias and motivations.

To make a concrete proposal: dismissal requires a supermajority.

The AB resolved:

• No change to dismissal voting threshold.
• The count of votes to dismiss each participant to be disclosed in the Council Report.

PR in #760 and annotated into the DoC; it's formally up to the Director whether to merge in this cycle. https://www.w3.org/Consortium/Process/Drafts/snapshots/2023-05-24-doc

The Revising W3C Process CG just discussed Require reporting of dismissal vote countes, and agreed to the following:

• RESOLVED: Merge PR 760