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Re: IESG voting procedures

2011-08-14 19:05:11
1. I'm glad that the ballot now has an explicit 'recuse' option.
Sorry about that red herring in my previous message.

2. (Excuse front posting). You can call it 'abstain' or you can
call it 'no'. What it means is that the AD concerned has
objections to the document that *cannot* be fixed (anything that
can be fixed is a 'discuss'). And I think in that case, there is
no way that one or two ADs should be able to block something
because they don't like it, *unless* they can convince the rest
of the IESG that the document is harmful.

Regards
   Brian

On 2011-08-15 09:55, Keith Moore wrote:
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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