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Re: Last Call: <draft-resnick-on-consensus-05.txt> (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC

2013-10-08 18:22:01

On Oct 8, 2013, at 1:56 PM, S Moonesamy <sm+ietf(_at_)elandsys(_dot_)com>
 wrote:

I am not sure whether hums are for a starting point or not.  It can be argued 
in different ways, for example, see Section 4. Humming helps to get a sense 
of the room without people making a decision under duress. 

Personally, I think focusing on Jeff Case's hums is missing the point. The 
point is the meaning of the term "rough consensus", and how that plays out in 
working group process. The manner of measurement is a secondary issue.

To my small and somewhat naive mind, the difference between rough consensus on 
a topic and a vote on the same topic is something about winners and losers. In 
a purely political process, when a set of parties vote on something and the 
preponderance (by some definition of "preponderance") say something, the views 
of the losing set of parties are deemed irrelevant. In IETF process, and 
hopefully in any technical process, there is understanding that the parties who 
disagree may have valid reasons to disagree, and a phase of negotiation. When 
we talk about "rough consensus", I understand it to mean - and would like to 
believe that we all understand it this way - that we investigate the reasons 
for disagreement, perhaps discover that some of them are valid, and address 
those issues to the satisfaction of those who raised them. As a result, the 
ultimate solution, even though it may not be the specific solution we would all 
have designed or selected, is one that in fact addresses all known issues. 
While we may not all agree, we don't disagree.

I think the document on the table tries to address that. There are points of 
phraseology that I might express differently, but it's close enough that I 
don't disagree.

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