What's the purpose of quorum? It's to make sure that one small group of a legislative body can't go behind everyone else's backs to pass something in the dead of night, and instead ensures that something has a wide range of input. But we're not just a legislative body — we're also the judicial body and the enforcement mechanism. We're also not from diametrically opposed, and share a lot of our goals and ideals for the site. We can work together — so it's weird to expect EVERY staff member to vote on policy they might not care about, and results in situations like people voluntarily refusing promotion to stay as JS. Votes that have clear consensus regularly struggle to pass just because people agree on them and therefore forget to vote on them, since it's much easier to remember to post to argue about something you have strong feelings on. Vote makers have to go around chasing people for their votes in staffchat to pass quorum, which nobody likes doing and wastes time. This all comes tacked onto the point that votes aren't even needed by the charter if something has 'clear consensus'.
After speaking with aismallard, I've felt much more strongly that the Wiki is different enough from legislative systems that use quorum that we can just…. abolish it. Use a system of consensus over time instead. There's no formal mark for how long a discussion/vote needs to go on, so formalize it at 7 and then see if there's any considerable opposition to it over those seven days. If there's not — a clear consensus — it passes, even if not >50% of staff responded. If a proposal does go to vote, same system.
Some policies are just going to be less interesting to people than others. One policy about, say, being required to add googley-eyes to all -J articles might be very hotly debated and draw in nearly all of staff, whereas another about CSS particulars may only attract a handful of interested staffers. And that's okay! As long as the policy is available for comment for a sufficient period of time, then whoever participated composes the voting body for a proposal, and that should be what's used to determine passage or failure.
If there's unclarity whether something counts as consensus or not, it probably doesn't, but I think the situation should be referred to admins to decide whether it counts as consensus or not, since admins were originally conceived of and intended to be a role that helped lead and shape site policy and shepherd the rest of staff. They haven't fulfilled that role in a while, but I think this would be a good start. Using fiat to extend timers to have more time to build a consensus, or to declare the vote having no consensus and essentially just not being passed, etc.
Since abstaining is a consequence of quorum — a way to help meet the arbitrary threshold without shifting it one way or the other — this would also incidentally get rid of abstaining. Which is good, because abstaining is weirdly more powerful than voting no in a lot of situations just because of an idiosyncrasy in our voting system.
I believe aismallard also suggested changing the binary of Yea/Nay in our voting threads to Weak Oppose/Oppose/Support/Weak support, which is more of a spectrum. This would help distinguish in less clear cases, for instance a policy which attracts 10 support and 4 oppose is much less clearly supported than if it were 10 support and 4 weak oppose.
I would like to note that this is not originally my idea, nor is it something I know all of the in and outs of. I don't have aaall of the answers on how it'd work, and it may have some Achilles heel I haven't registered. But it's an idea that really stuck with me and I think it at the very least deserves its day in the public forum. Instead of constantly chasing each other for votes and trying to meet an arbitrarily-decided threshold or change it so that we can finally meet it, we could just opt for a more… subjective, human-compatible approach for passing policy.