Dave Crocker wrote:
Brian,
To date, we treat most of the IETF process as uinsg free resources.
....
To be blunt, I believe this is a direct consequence of our open door,
individual participation ethic. If you want firm resource commitments,
you have to ask corporations and other organizations, not individuals,
to make the commitment.
You could not be more wrong. The open door policy might call for some
creativity in resource management, but it in no way guarantees that we are
unable to manage our aggregate resources
It pushes us into a significantly less predictable situation than with
committed resources. That's guaranteed.
I made a particular point that I believe you entirely missed. It is fundamental
and it is really quite simple.
Embrace it, and quite a bit of IETF management becomes pretty simple. Ignore it
and we are pretty likely to have the kind of chaos and erratic behavior that
dominates the IETF today.
The point is about the real meaning of rough consensus.
Rough consensus is about a strongly dominant constituency in favor of something.
If there is a strongly dominant constituency in favor of something, then that
something gets done.
Of course. But I don't see the connection with rough consensus. Exactly the same
is true in voting standards bodies - if there is no majority constituency,
nothing gets done.
And, by the way, it gets done in a timely fashion or else
the constituency evaporates.
Exactly the same in a voting organisation. Except (and I don't
personally like this) they tend to meet deadlines by holding
votes on whatever text they have at that time.
Require that an effort begin with -- and continue to demonstrate -- a serious
constituency in terms of numbers and activity, and most of our problems
disappear.
Exactly the same in a voting organisation.
Ignore that requirement and we are, instead, we are left with congestion,
individual idealism and vetoes... and a belief that there is nothing we can do
about it.
So if you have a WG with only 6 active participants whose only job is a large
MIB, do we deem it too small and too inactive? Whereas a WG with 100 active
partcipants and 30 drafts in progress but no drafts reaching the IESG is OK?
Brian
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