Hi Michael,
on 2006-07-15 07:13 Michael Thomas said the following:
Is it just in my part of the ietf woods, or is this becoming a widespread
phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
On the one hand, it can be really difficult to get a feel for consensus on
a mailing list where silence may mean agreement, boredom with the
topic, or just... silence. And then there's the general problem that since
we're engineers articulations of agreement generally start with some
form of "it depends". So maybe a short hand way of saying "this is
good enough for me, let's not go into the weeds by my agreeing for
potentially different reasons" is a generally Good Thing.
On the other hand, it sure seems like this sort of thing can be gamed.
That is, somebody posts something and three or four of the usual suspect
chime in with their +1 and lo and behold it looks a lot more like consensus
than the previous "it depends" tomes. But is it really consensus, or is it
just (benignly) a way for the usual suspects to signal to each other that
they are willing live with another's proposal (which is not to say that
that is necessarily a small thing in itself)? And what about when it's not
benign? Could it be that +1 could be a way to short circuit inspection and
debate in er, um, more, um, politicized settings?
That and it seems all so very <aol>me too!</aol>
When I've seen it working best, the possible expressions of viewpoint
are: +1 +0 -0 -1 (and in a community with a benevolent dictator,
-10000 or some other large-magnitude negative number).
Personally, I know it best from the mailing list devoted to the development
of the Python programming language, where Python's creator, like a chair,
gives attention to community rough consensus, but unlike a chair has
the possibility of overriding the more-or-less rough consensus at times.
The possibility of expressing +0 and -0 seems to aid in sorting things
out and expressing people's preferences, too; and the expression of -1
without a reasoned explanation of why seems to be frowned upon.
I think that the reason why this seems to be a spreading meme could be
that when an informed discussion reaches a point where people believe a
clear solution is in sight, +1 is a visually very distinct way of saying
"Works for me".
Henrik
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