Voting vs. reasoned debate vs. "rough consensus"

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> Re: Voting Idea? (Was: Last Call: 'Requirements for IETF        DraftSubmission Toolset' to Informational RFC)
>  Date: 2005-04-06 09:12
>  From: Brian E Carpenter <brc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> The free site I found says "voting"; of course, what the IETF
> can use such things for is only straw polls. But in a case
> like the present one, I think that is a reasonable way of
> finding out what the centre of gravity of opinion is.
> 
> In ASCII art:
>                    /\
> Consensus:   ____/  \___
> 
>                        /\
> Rough Consensus  ____/  \___/\___
> 
> 
> Badly phrased question: ___/\____/\____/\____/\___
> 
> (I'm reasonably serious about that)

Maybe -- maybe not.

Here's what one IETF WG chair had to say (where "this topic" refers
to a specific issue under discussion in the WG):
----------------------
On the topic of voting: Especially on this topic, I think voting 
would be stupid. The decision is about rough consensus. One screaming 
person does not indicate that there is no rough consensus, but one or 
two well-reasoned arguments against a screaming huge crowd does. And 
a huge number of "I'd prefer X, but I couldn't care less" votes 
versus 2 or 3 well-argued "X will spell doom for the Internet, and Y 
will save it" votes *is* rough consensus for Y over X. So voting 
generally doesn't help me decide one way or the other that there is 
rough consensus.
-----------------------

In short, quality of argument trumps (if the chair is chairing)
quantity.  Voting (incl. as "straw polls") only measures quantity, not
quality.

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