The process seems to be today what I call "Consensus by Osmosis."
People get tired of the highly mixed discipline subjective
philosophies, many times subject to personal agendas, and conflict of
interest, many get shouted out even to the extent of ignorance at the
suggestion of key cogs. So even if there was a healthy sampling of
participants, at some point, its filtered by osmosis and often there
is already an handicap with editors providing +1s the WG has to
overcome when a change is in disagreement but doesn't reach the "rough
consensus." In my view, the process is outdated. It may sense 20-30
years ago when there were still a world of unknowns and hard "rough
consensus" decisions had to made. But today, to me, a rough consensus
made - both sides are worthy ideas and compromises need to made rather
than a cold cutoff of nearly half a WG. My opinion.
Fred Baker wrote:
On Jul 11, 2011, at 10:58 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
We quite often discuss here how to judge rough consensus. In a completely non-IETF context, I came upon a reference to an article published in 2007 with the catchy title "Inferring the Popularity of an Opinion From Its Familiarity: A Repetitive Voice Can Sound Like a Chorus".
We deal with that quite a bit. I can think of discussions in v6ops and on this
list in which a single person contributed one message in four in a 200+ message
thread, and although he was the lone speaker with that viewpoint, my co-chair
told me he thought we lacked consensus.
To my mind, it's not a matter of voting (how many people think A, how many people think B, ...) and
not a matter of volume (which would accept a filibuster as a showstopper). It's a question of the
preponderance of opinion ("agreement, harmony, concurrence, accord, unity, unanimity,
solidarity; formal concord") coupled with listening carefully to those who disagree and
determining whether their arguments actually make sense and point up an issue. I will recognize a
single person's point at issue if it appears that they are not being listened to or their issue
dealt with. If they are simply hammering a point, and their point is incorrect, I will note that
they have been hammering an incorrect point ("even though you are sending one email in four in
a long thread and are expressing extreme concern about a draft because it does ____, I will
overlook your objections because it doesn't do that.") and move on.
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Hector Santos, CTO
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http://santronics.blogspot.com
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