I'm frankly still trying to decide how to vote on this one as the deadline approaches. It's looking like a choice for the lesser of two evils.

I agree with the arguments that *in principle* we shouldn't need lots of bureaucracy and that the possibility of "friendly" amendments can provide a disincentive for people to be careful and not rush to make and second motions, although maybe some of this will always happen.

OTOH sometimes amendments are desirable as we're voting on a motion that needs to be revised. I don't view the saving of maybe two weeks of time to pass a motion as a major factor for most situations that involve TB. However, if motions are going to be altered between the time that they're posted formally and moved and the time that the results are publicly announced and communicated to our CD, then I am firmly convinced that we need a formal procedure to do this.

I can recall three friendly amendments during my service on TB (about two and a half years). The first two were fairly innocuous even if they didn't lead to the results I wanted. In one case, the amendment was accepted but the motion failed. The second time, the proposer of the motion refused to accept a minor amendment that I thought was needed after it was pointed out by an "expert" in the TBT thread concerning the motion. However, the third instance--the general rental car forum--was a real mess because there were no formal rules and everything about it was done in an apparently ad hoc and arbitrary way, culminating in the "but we don't want this to be implemented for months" last minute addendum that was a complete surprise to some TB members. The process that was followed lacked transparency and collegiality. It made at least one TB member feel that (my own paraphrase to avoid quoting from a post in the private TBT forum) their opinions and contributions weren't valued. Other more minor but nevertheless important early comments were belittled as "typos" but continued to fail to be corrected in the formal motion as voting proceeded, even though it would have been very easy to correct the motion at that stage after the obvious "fixes" had been pointed out.

I don't want to see TB ever proceed this way again. The potential for damage to both FT and TB is too great, especially within an elected group of nine people from different backgrounds who should be working together to achieve concensus about how to best improve FT.

BTW, I had been clearly in favor of this motion until I started thinking about some of the arguments posted more recently in this TBT thread and then proceeded to re-read the motion once again very carefully and think about it. Now I'm not so sure because this change to the TB guidelines won't necessarily prevent what happened with the general rental cars motion.