Greetings again. The subject line is an honest question, not a gripe.
For those on the ietf@ mailing list, please see
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-v6ops-6to4-to-historic/ballot/>.
In short, the IESG just approved publication of
draft-ietf-v6ops-6to4-to-historic, even with what appears to be a lack of
consensus in the comments on the ietf@ mailing list. One AD called it "pretty
rough", but my quick count shows that it was not rough at all: there were more
people on the ietf@ against this than in favor of it. If the consensus in a WG
for a document was the same as we saw on ietf@ for this document, and the WG
chair declared consensus anyway, there would be some serious talks with that WG
AD about the chairs.
For a document such as this, why even ask for IETF consensus if the IETF
consensus doesn't matter? There was a lot of good discussion and a fair number
of varied objections to approval of the document. It sounds like the WG was
strongly in favor of the document, which may be sufficient motivation to
publish it, but the intermediate step of asking for IETF consensus and then not
paying attention to the result then seems wasteful of IETF time.
If the IESG has a policy that "WG consensus trumps IETF consensus", that's
fine, but it should be a stated policy so we know where to spend our time. If
this document is special for some reason (for example, because it was about
policy instead of being a protocol) and therefore the IESG measures consensus
differently, that too is fine if we all know that ahead of time. Even a policy
of "more than a dozen IETF regulars must object on ietf@ before we will
consider overturning a WG" is fine, as long as it is a stated policy. If the
IESG has a policy that says "the way we count in IETF Last Call is different
than the way we expect Working Group chairs to count in WG Last call", that's
fine as well. None of that is obvious from the ballot comments that are visible
to the community, however.
Guidance from the IESG for our future participation in IETF Last Call
discussions would be greatly appreciated. We try to save you folks time and
effort; such guidance would return the favor to us.
--Paul Hoffman
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