Dave, > Working group rough consensus is supposed to determine decisions within > a working group. If the chairs can 'ram through changes by silencing > people" then there is a much, much deeper problem with the working group > that merely having late drafts getting submitted. I find that rough consensus BARELY works (if it can be said to work at all) for technical matters. I've watched working group chairs abuse their ability to declare rough consensus. The result has been many a camel. Maybe this does indeed point to a deeper problem (who needs so many camels? ;-), but working group chairs should NOT make it up as they go along. They have enough to do. So you need some general rules of behavior, and this falls under that category. It's a bit of a social contract where we say "it is reasonable for people to have their drafts in a certain point in advance, and therefore it is reasonable for people who participate in the meetings to have read them." Nothing arbitrary about that. In order to relax the rule, the guy who shows up in the working group who has questions because he has NOT read the draft would have to be accommodated at the expense of the time of everyone else. I think the change would be a bad trade off. Also, having worked with standards bodies who DO NOT have this rule, I can tell you that it's quite frustrating to get into an argument with someone only to discover that each is working off a different version of a draft. It also makes diffs harder when someone actually sends text. Eliot _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf