On 10/7/14 10:08 AM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote:
Just piling in after Barry here ... and speaking as the AD who had the
most recent ¨draft on a telechat agenda with consensus = unknown¨, but
I'm hardly the only one.
The field in the tracker is labeled ¨consensus¨, which is ambiguous but
actually means ¨IETF consensus¨. So, it should be set after IETF Last Call.
A fair number of the documents I've processed already had it set to
¨yes¨ when they were publication-requested, so that means the
shepherd/working group chairs thought it meant ¨working group consensus¨.
I believe - but Barry would know - that we've requested that the field
label be changed to ¨IETF Consensus¨ in the datatracker.
I think that would be helpful.
In this particular case there appear to be two primary sources of
confusion: 1) on what the word "consensus" means in terms of
process in the datatracker, and 2) that the datatracker is being
taken to be normative rather than informative. The first appears
to be confusing to a few people and it's great that it's being
addressed; I've never seen anybody be confused about the latter
before. Doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, but I suspect
that it's not a general problem and the lack of a giant red
"FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY" label on the datatracker and
tools pages does not appear to be an impediment to getting anything
done. If this is a more general problem let's do something about
it, and if it's not let's drop it and move on.
Melinda