--On Thursday, 24 May, 2007 14:11 -0400 Jeffrey Hutzelman
<jhutz(_at_)cmu(_dot_)edu> wrote:
This is a difficult problem. I'm sure there are many cases
where people should speak up and don't. There are also a
number of cases where someone who has legitimately lost
refuses to accept that. Unfortunately, the latter are usually
much more easily observed. If we could find a way to
drastically cut down on either category without growing the
other, we'd be able to make substantial improvements, both to
the IETF and, if the solution scales, to society as a whole.
Unfortunately, it's a hard problem.
There are also cases in which people fear retaliation of one
sort or another if they raise objections, especially when they
perceive that the IAB and/or IESG have already made up their
minds and were likely to treat further input as an irritation or
worse. At one time, I thought these fears were groundless in at
least the overwhelming number of cases (and that the exceptions
involved serious bad apples on the IESG who probably would have
been recalled had that process been more effective). However,
some observations in the last few years have led me to conclude
that things have shifted in the direction of that concern being
more legitimate, i.e., a person who exerts vigorous and
constructive objections to action on one issue may be at risk of
damaging his or her ability to get things done in the IETF in
the future.
If that concern is actually real, we are in trouble and
theoretical discussions about consensus processes are not going
to help us get out of it.
john
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