Many people's roles seemed to be what I'd like to call the »watchdogs«. They didn't contribute much – neither in terms of musical skill nor otherwise – safe questioning every- and anything other people did for the crew. And boy did they love the principles.

As you already mentioned: job, family, friends come first, and then I have other hobby horses, too. So when I volunteered to organise gigs (negotiating money/transport/food, assuring we turned up with a crew that could actually play some of the tunes some of the time etc.), I cut my career short pretty emmedieately because the watchdogs made an efficient organisation impossible: they made it hard to pick gigs that were eligible: the events had to be not for profit, even though we asked for quite a substantial amount of money. The sponsors had to be clean and were not allowed to be connected with political parties, even if the party in question had pretty much the same agenda.

All this usually only surfaced and became a problem after someone had gotten the »go ahead« from a previous consensual decision. So in addition to an imense overhead decisions were never reliable and could be taken several times with several outcomes.

As an organiser, I can't worlk like that and as a programmer it sure is even more impossible.

In the end, I guess what I'm saying is that consensual decision making easily can turn into a euphemism fo decision making grinding to a halt, killing the rest of enthusiasm there is. Big, dangerous problem.