"Community" consensus?

Last week, User:Witty lama had a great post where he wrote:

At what point is something "controversial"? As far as I can remember there hasn't been a single decision in the history of Wikimedia that has received universal support. Some people will complain no matter what happens. When you're the person doing the complaining it is your POV that the issue is "controversial", whereas when you're the one who isn't complaining then it is your POV that the issue is NOT "controversial" and the complainers are just overreacting.

There seems to be an ongoing paralysis to try things, because people are waiting for feedback from "the community", and they don't necessarily know how to get it or how to interpret it. My questions are:

• What are our current mechanisms for understanding what "the community" wants?
• Are there other potentially better mechanisms for polling "the community"?
• How good do our mechanisms for community feedback need to be before we can rely on them for decision-making?

An obvious example is advertising, but I'm sure there are many others. Would be interested in people's thoughts.

I think the best proposed solution so far to the community paralysis issue has been Lodewijk's idea of a "Volunteer Council", taken up by Sue here as a recommendation for this task force.

The Volunteer Council would of course be a broadbrush multi-project Wikimedia group, though, and we would have to look at more specific, possibly analogous, arrangements to deal with issues affecting individual projects such as the English Wikipedia.

It would be great if someone could actually articulate what the Volunteer Council idea is: What purpose it would serve, and so forth. If there are links to existing information on this, could you post them to Volunteer Council? Thanks!

Good point, I have now summarized the existing material and provided links to the relevant discussions at the Volunteer Council page.