On Aug 14, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Adrian Farrel wrote:
AFAIK the process that Keith calls out has never needed to be executed.
The process that I call out is any case where an IESG member is expected to
vote abstain when he disagrees with the WG on the merits of a document or an
appropriate fix. Based on my own experience in IESG, I'd be very surprised if
that never happened nowadays.
Note that when an AD does abstain he usually writes a strong comment in the
datatracker explaining why he is abstaining.
I suppose my objections can be distilled into these points:
1) it's misleading to label this as an "abstain" vote, no matter how it's
defined in IESG procedures
2) such objections should be treated more seriously than required by the
current process
3) anything written in the data tracker is essentially buried to the audience
of the RFCs (though RFC errata might work somewhat better)
I'm not saying that a single AD should be able to block a document
indefinitely, but neither should it be presumed that the WG should inherently
prevail in a conflict.
I actually think that the "rough consensus" model is not well suited for IESG,
because IESG rarely has enough members with the kind of expertise needed to
make that kind of judgment. The number of IESG members who review a typical
document and really understand its implications is probably around 3-4. Most
of those voting "no objection" have probably not read the document, at least
not in depth. So in a case where there's one sponsoring AD voting yes and one
AD voting discuss, it's really close to one or two in favor against one
opposed. But the way IESG votes, distorts this and makes it look like many
against one.
Keith
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