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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-05-31 13:05:56
One thing that occurs to me is that in my initial message I implicitly
felt that the room hands/hums were a more accurate assessment of
consensus than the list. I guess that I should fess up that I've always
felt that the "consensus is determined on the list" is something of a
charming myth. Of course if we went with the room consensus,
gaming the system would just be done by different means, so my
feeling shouldn't be taken as endorsement of that as an alternative.

      Mike

Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
Oh, I understand cultural sensitivities, but I have never heard of not wanting to challenge in the public (except the disagreeing with the employer thing). The problem with that is that if people don't like something and can't speak up or will only speak through a chair or an AD, it allows natural avenues for abuse. The chair or the AD might as well be making decisions at that point.

Even anonymous voting has verifiability as the crucial part of requirements.

If our consensus process is not independently and openly verifiable, we might as well close shop!

Lakshminath

PS: BTW, I agree with Melinda that we should not allow a minority to block progress; in any type of consensus process, unfortunately some of us will be at the losing end of things.

On 5/31/2007 12:33 PM, Spencer Dawkins wrote:


The alternative - a WG chair who tells the working group that the apparent WG consensus on the mailing list is being overruled because of anonymous objections that the WG chair cannot share with the WG, or because of private objections that the WG chair is "channeling" from a back room - would make voting seem reasonable (or, to use Mark Allman's characterization in another thread, "seem charming").

Thanks,

Spencer


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