I have voted and I believe that the class should be allowed to grow into an viable class in its own time. It is hard to predict when the class will be ready to stand on its own feet. I remember it took over 4 years for the F16 class to grow sufficiently strong and cohesive before I could build back the all important chairman role.

A very small pool of owners is not someting you want to give all class control too. You'll need a rather large number of world wide distributed owners to compensate/cancel for the unavoidable nuttcases and to avoid a voting pool that is overly conservative. Democratic systems only work when you have more then 1 sufficiently powerful voting block and hence a balance of power that forces discussion, negociation and compromise. Otherwise will just derail to a aristocracy under a new name.

Based on past experiences I feel that during the start up fase we need a powerful single figure that have enough sense of the common good to steer the class into the right direction till the numbers, structure and class spirit are sufficiently developped to take over. This can indeed last for several years. This does not however mean that this chairman is not obliged to discuss and measure the mood on everything with nearly everyone. Basically, what he will be doing is finding and building a wide concensus among the associated parties and class members before reaching and rolling out any decisions. In that sense it is not much different from a full democratic system. The owners and parties are still heard and influence the decisions heavily. It is just that the this powerful person has enough control and influence to effectively steer the project, react quickly to challenges and has enough security and power to advance initially unpopular decisions that are yet much needed for the later common good.

In my experience a full democratic system is very ill equipped to lead a emerging project or to efectively steer a project that faces many challenges and required quick and decisive steerage. Afterall democracy in neither quick nor decisive. Look at long it has taken us to achieve concensus on the basic F12 specs despote the fact that the values we are about to vote in were first proposed back januari 2007 and failed the win concensus in the first 3 tries ! I don't think a new class can affort to handle the future challenges in such a way.

Wouter