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Re: Alternative decision process in RTCWeb

2013-12-01 11:01:48
On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 7:54 AM, Melinda Shore 
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>wrote:

On 11/30/13 4:45 AM, Roger Jørgensen wrote:
And if the problem is that bad, that it's impossible to reach
consensus in the WG, what about replacing the chairs? ...

Not for failure to gain consensus, by any means.  "No consensus,
do nothing" is a legitimate (if frustrating) outcome.  I think
they showed really questionable judgment in calling for a vote
and laying out eligibility criteria, and for me that's a huge issue
(congratulations, guys - just like that you changed us into a
member organization) but failure to gain consensus is a valid
outcome.


For what it's worth, all the chairs agree that failure to get consensus is
a valid outcome and it may be where we end up.  The internal discussion
among the chairs and RAI ADs was extremely extensive and not at all fun;
think soul-searching, beating of breasts, tearing of sack cloth, and
wearing of ashes.   Trust us that we did not do this lightly; as one of us
put it in the internal discussion: "We're going to get an epic beat down
for this".

So why did we put ourselves forward for that?  Because we're charged as WG
to make the WebRTC ecosystem as complete and strong as we can.  if we don't
have a decision on this issue, we're creating a standard that will be
hobbled out of the gate.  Its baseline negotiation mechanism means it has
some freedom of movement, and it may eventually get up a good speed. But
this hurts it in ways that it is very hard for us to ignore.  We'd be going
out with a large likelihood of isolated WebRTC communities, especially in
mobile apps, instead of a unified ecosystem.  Balancing that pain against
this is not easy.

We would have preferred to get consensus; we would have preferred over this
to get an RFC 3929 decision.  And at no time did we propose imposing voting
unilateraly.  We have sought the consensus of the working group on it, to
see if this works as a last ditch effort to see if there is *any* way
forward.

So, three ex-ADs and two current ones agreed to go this far out on a limb
to get some way forward. It was sufficiently important for us to put this
out, _knowing we'd get an epic beat down for it_.  That's how much this
decision means.

There may not be any way forward, and we'll accept that if that is the
result of this discussion.  I personally continue to hope that this set of
exchanges will raise awareness among working group participants of the
importance of pushing to a common standard here, and that we may see some
common ground emerge.

regards,

Ted Hardie




Melinda