Quote from: DannyHamilton on September 02, 2015, 06:12:46 PM

Consensus is great if all the participants have the same general goal.

It is impossible if the participants have significantly different and incompatible goals.

In that situation, the best you're going to get with your proposal is either:

Democracy with exile: Anyone that refuses to accept a compromise that the majority of participants find reasonable is simply accused of making "it clear that he does not believe in the Consensus Building Process and is doing nothing to help in it's success" and is therefore exiled from participating in the process at all. The process repeats until all those that disagree with the majority have been exiled. The remaining (non-exiled) participants therefore have 100% consensus.

Stagnation: Those with different goals than the majority can simply refuse to accept any "compromise". They can furthermore continuously propose "compromises" that are unacceptable to the majority of the participants. The decision making process gets help up indefinitely, and changes that most sensible people feel are important and urgent don't get implemented.

Good points. You can never totally get rid of bad actors that intentionally disturb the decisoin making process

There could be ways to reward the consensus building and punish the opposite. For example, the community first makes several consensus candidates, then holds 3 rounds of opinion poll. Everyone's opinion has a weight factor, if one's opinion is not the major consensus, next time his opinion will have a much less weight, like 50%, if he's opinion is with the majority, he will regain his 100% weight. By this means, those who constantly going against the majority will have less and less influence on the final decision

So when you know that your opinion is against the major consensus, it is time to rethink why there are so many people supporting the major consensus and adjust your position accordingly. The basic principle is that consensus have the highest priority, the participants gains most when they join the major consensus