Re: Voting vs. reasoned debate vs. "rough consensus"

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I don't disagree. Counting heads is a blunt instrument for subtle
questions. But there are cases where it's informative.

    Brian

Bruce Lilly wrote:
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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