Hi all. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is I wanted to say about how I think AUSC worked (and didn't). I served as an interim member and then as an elected at-large member, about a years total, so I'm probably in the best position to actually say (roughly) what was going on. So, general information.
In our inaugural term we had User:Thatcher, User:Mackensen, myself, User:FloNight, User:John Vandenberg, User:Roger Davies. In our initial cases, we dealt with a lot of self-definition. Trying to decide exactly what our mandate was, what our internal procedures were going to be, how we interacted with the other functionaries, the Arbitration Committee, and the other subcommittees. We also published our first set of stats which was supposed to be part of the thing. (At this point, I'd like to take a moment to apologize publicly to my fellow subcommittee members for dropping the ball on the oversights stats project.)
Generally speaking in the first term, two of the at-large members were moderately active to very active, one was rarely active, two of the arbitrator members were very active, one was moderately active.
The Audit Subcommittee suffered from both structural and personnel problems. Generally speaking, we were reluctant to move forward on any case out unless at least half of the subcommittee had spoken on a matter or better yet, the entire subcommittee. If even a single member isn't speaking up an issue, not only is one sixth of work force unavailable but it becomes very difficult to obtain a consensus. Any time the Audit Subcommittee moved forward we spoke as a group, so having all voices involved was critical. These were never formal requirements, but my read of the prevailing norms.
Unfortunately, beyond those structural issues, we had deeper levels of dysfunction.