"Gonzalo" == Gonzalo Camarillo
<Gonzalo(_dot_)Camarillo(_at_)ericsson(_dot_)com> writes:
Hi. I've thought about the general issue of alternative decision making
a lot, and it did come up a number of times while I was an AD, although
none with such significant stakeholder interest as this.
The issue I'm most concerned about is confirming that there is rough
consensus to make a decision. I think any variance from rough consensus
for decision making must itself meet a fairly high consensus bar.
"But we can't make a decision; we have to make a decision, so of course
we're going to do something alternative," you might say.
You don't have to make a decision though. You can decide the IETF is
not the right forum for your decision. You can decide not to
standardize. You can decide to run experiments, get data, try to
implement. You can give up.
You can redefine the problem. You can for example decide to have two
mandatory-to-implement options, or require receivers to implement both
and not mandate which senders must pick.
In many cases it does turn out to be easier to get consensus that a
decision must be made than it is to get consensus on a decision.
However without chairs being able to clearly show that consensus to
decide has been reached I'd expect an appeal and expect that appeal to
be successful.
Next, it's strongly desirable to get consensus on your process for
making the decision.
If you can get that, or lacking that, get consensus on someone who will
decide the process (chairs or AD), I think you are coming along
reasonably.
Obviously concerns of fairness are important. A process that inherently
advantaged one company or viewpoint would be suspect.
I'd personally favor coin-flips, external arbitors or similar over
voting. We don't want to encourage voting because we could get into
situations where people block the consensus process in order to force a
vote. Absent things like well-defined membership and procedures to
avoid one company stuffing the ballot box, going there seems
problematic.
Coin flips are nice. They really create pressure among anyone who
actually cares about the outcome to compromise, to explore whether a
consensus can be built. However for the frequent situations where a
decision is critical but it really doesn't matter (even if some people
think it does), they get the job done.