I'm a fan of consensus decision-making processes and will generally -
but not always - advocate for their use. I think that this is one
of those "not always" cases. First, we do not run every single
decision past the IETF, so I think that argument needs to be put
to rest. Furthermore, we do not always allow the consensus
decision to carry the day - for example, it's common to have
broad support for undertaking a piece of work but not have that
work go forward because of opposition from the I*. The answer to
that seems to be that the position that prevails does so on
technical merit, and I hope that's true (although I'm not convinced
that it's always true). But, I think it's important to understand
that when that happens, we're dismissing consensus views because
we think that those views are wrong, not because there's consensus
to do something different. In those cases, the I* are not simply
respecting the consensus of the body, they're doing something
different.
Anyway, we're now in a situation in which a few people have
expressed concern that an ombudsman could make bad situations worse.
I think that's a valid concern - anybody who reads the Washington
Post has probably seen an ombudsman make some really terrible
decisions, and just recently we saw the IETF mailing list
ombudsman make what I thought was a good decision on a just
awful basis. But given that, my own feeling is that the benefit
of having an anti-harassment policy outweighs the possible cost
of having one which might occasionally lead to bad/incorrect
outcomes. Someone else might feel differently, and they would
not be wrong, they're just operating within a different
framework and have different values. It's extremely difficult
to come to consensus in that situation, particularly when you've
got thousands of participants and a notable lack of interest on
the part of entirely too many in saying "I don't agree, but I can
live with that."
And then there are issues around the establishment of bases for
a decision. It is not unreasonable for people to ask whether or
not there's an actual problem, and whether or not past incidents
have been sufficiently severe to merit the creation of a policy.
We've seen those requests. I think that it's very much in the
interest of the people involved not to allow those to be relitigated
in public.
I think one of the things to understand about consensus decision-
making is that it has notably poor scaling properties. I absolutely
agree that we need to be better at managing how we reach decisions
within a consensus framework, but I also think we need to be smarter
about recognizing when it's the just plain wrong process to use. We
let the IESG handle a lot of "management" decisions, and I'm good
with letting them handle this one.
Melinda