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Re: Why ask for IETF Consensus on a WG document?

2011-06-24 06:48:19
On Jun 24, 2011, at 5:40 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote:


Basically, I approached this the way Peter did. One further
point below though.

On 24/06/11 02:15, Paul Hoffman wrote:
Said a different way, what needs to happen in IETF Last Call to overcome "we 
already discussed this in the WG" (which was the majority of the positive 
comments in this case)? Does a non-WG member need to do more, and if so 
what? 

In addition to the other factors already mentioned, I didn't
see what I thought were significant new facts or issues being
raised at the IETF LC. I think that such things are perhaps
more likely to cause the IETF rough consensus to differ from
that in the WG. In this case, it looked to me like people
were bringing concerns already expressed in the WG to the
attention of the wider community, which is a reasonable thing
to do in cases like this where the WG consensus was already
fairly rough.

It could well be that I know so little about 6to4 that I was
wrong in that conclusion of course, but then there's so much
about which I know so little that I've gotten used to living
with that risk;-)

It's problematic, and I believe inappropriate, to consider WG consensus as 
contributing to community consensus.  The two questions need to be considered 
separately, for two reasons:

1. Working groups often have strong biases and aren't representative of the 
whole community.  Put another way, a working group often represents only one 
side of a tussle, and working groups are often deliberately chartered in such a 
way as to minimize the potential for conflict within the group.   So when 
evaluating standards actions for the whole community, the consensus within a 
working group means little.   In this particular case, v6ops heavily represents 
the interests of operators (who are naturally interested in having IPv6 run 
smoothly in the long term) and works against the interests of applications 
developers (who are naturally interested in having transition mechanisms that 
allow them to ship code that uses IPv6 and an IPv6 programming model regardless 
of whether the underlying network supports it).

2. Working groups have spent a lot of time working on a document and will have 
several members actively participating.  By contrast, most of the wider 
community will not have these issues "on their radar" until they come up for 
IETF-wide Last Call.   Also, busy people need to find time to review a document 
before making comments, and this may require multiple readings.  So it's hardly 
surprising if the number of IETF-wide Last Call comments is smaller than the 
number of WG Last Call comments.   Consensus needs to be evaluated separately 
in the WG and the IETF because the populations and sample sizes are different.

Keith

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