Re: Voting Idea? (Was: Last Call: 'Requirements for
IETF DraftSubmission Toolset' to Informational RFC)
Date: 2005-04-06 09:12
From: Brian E Carpenter <brc(_at_)zurich(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com>
The free site I found says "voting"; of course, what the IETF
can use such things for is only straw polls. But in a case
like the present one, I think that is a reasonable way of
finding out what the centre of gravity of opinion is.
In ASCII art:
/\
Consensus: ____/ \___
/\
Rough Consensus ____/ \___/\___
Badly phrased question: ___/\____/\____/\____/\___
(I'm reasonably serious about that)
Maybe -- maybe not.
Here's what one IETF WG chair had to say (where "this topic" refers
to a specific issue under discussion in the WG):
----------------------
On the topic of voting: Especially on this topic, I think voting
would be stupid. The decision is about rough consensus. One screaming
person does not indicate that there is no rough consensus, but one or
two well-reasoned arguments against a screaming huge crowd does. And
a huge number of "I'd prefer X, but I couldn't care less" votes
versus 2 or 3 well-argued "X will spell doom for the Internet, and Y
will save it" votes *is* rough consensus for Y over X. So voting
generally doesn't help me decide one way or the other that there is
rough consensus.
-----------------------
In short, quality of argument trumps (if the chair is chairing)
quantity. Voting (incl. as "straw polls") only measures quantity, not
quality.
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