We actually had a talk about this amongst several IESG and former IESG members.
I am not going to report the results, because I might remember them wrong,
but my thoughts on this are as follows:
- The hum is not a means of determining consensus; it is a means of determining
the sense of the room. If the hum is clearly many in favor, nobody
against,then you have consensus, but that's unusual. If the hum shows many in
favor and some against, you need to go to the next step, because you do not yet
know whether you have consensus.
- So since the hum was quite inconclusive, the next question is, "can somebody
who objects please say why." One way to approach that is to ask for a show of
hands. Here, the chairs could have asked for a show of hands against—the show
of hands for was unnecessary. But this is forgivable, I think, unless you
think people were intimidated by the show of hands for. I think that would be
hard to argue, given that they had already heard the result of the hum.
- So the show of hands against elicited no hands. I was there, that's what I
remember seeing too.
So at this point, what do you do? Nobody is willing to stand up and say "I
think we shouldn't go forward with this because of X." Many people have said
"we think we should go forward with this, support doing this, and want to
participate."
To me, that's consensus.
That wasn't the full outcome of the BoF; there was a lot of good feedback and
the charter needs work. But it's pretty clear to me that in principle at
least, there was consensus to do this work.
If you disagree, now would be a fine time to say so, although if in fact we get
a charter that the IESG decides is worth floating, you will get another chance
during the last call on the charter.