Dearlove, Christopher (UK) wrote:
dcrocker(_at_)bbiw(_dot_)net
From what you've written, your basic point seems to be that 51% isn't
enough; it's worth making that explicit.
To add to the confusion, and to emphasise the point about making clear,
British and American English differ here. If three proposals (not the
most common case, I agree, but it can happen) have 45%, 35% and 20%
of the votes, the first of these has a majority, sometimes emphasised
as simple majority, in British English. (We do not - to our loss - use
the word plurality. Just 51% is given the strong term absolute majority.)
I haven't checked the context here, but saying not just a simple
majority might suggest to a British English user that 51% is enough.
Voting as is done in elections for political parties is often going
to produce a political result, a personal preference of a few rather
than an engineering solution that adequately addresses the concerns
of the community at large.
What we could do in the IETF, is not just trying to pick the lesser evil,
but rather use the _engineering_ skills to modify and/or merge proposals
to increase the number of folks that support the result and reduce
the amount of folks that object the result.
With your example of three competing proposals: A, B and C, and by couting
"votes" the WG chair determine support of 45%, 35% and 20% respectively,
does this mean that A has signficant support? Not at all. It could be
that the folks who voted for B and C did so because they are both strongly
opposed to A.
A WG chair who wants to be neutral on the decision should probably not
just call:
which of the three proposals do you prefer: A, B or C
and perform political inferences on the result, but rather
_ask_ the engineers direclty:
if we were to select A, would you "support it, are neutral, are opposed"
if you're either neutral or opposed to A, what change(s) to A would
make you supportive for A?
if we were to select B, would you "support it, are neutral, are opposed"
if you're either neutral or opposed to A, what change(s) to A would
make you supportive for B?
if we were to select C, would you "support it, are neutral, are opposed"
if you're either neutral or opposed to A, what change(s) to A would
make you supportive for C?
I've seen a few "WG consensus calls" which appeared somewhat skewed/biased
to me towards exclusing specific outcomes. I do _not_ know whether this
was causes by malicous intent or just accidental / not sufficiently well
thought out. I'm OK with a leadership decision, but leadership decisions
should not be exerted early in the process by preventing certain questions
to get asked at all.
How well the process works can be seen by how objections are resolved.
Are objections handled by spin doctors, or by engineers that are open
to improvements of their work.
-Martin