Hi Michael, on 2006-07-15 07:13 Michael Thomas said the following: > Is it just in my part of the ietf woods, or is this becoming a widespread > phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing? > > On the one hand, it can be really difficult to get a feel for consensus on > a mailing list where silence may mean agreement, boredom with the > topic, or just... silence. And then there's the general problem that since > we're engineers articulations of agreement generally start with some > form of "it depends". So maybe a short hand way of saying "this is > good enough for me, let's not go into the weeds by my agreeing for > potentially different reasons" is a generally Good Thing. > > On the other hand, it sure seems like this sort of thing can be gamed. > That is, somebody posts something and three or four of the usual suspect > chime in with their +1 and lo and behold it looks a lot more like consensus > than the previous "it depends" tomes. But is it really consensus, or is it > just (benignly) a way for the usual suspects to signal to each other that > they are willing live with another's proposal (which is not to say that > that is necessarily a small thing in itself)? And what about when it's not > benign? Could it be that +1 could be a way to short circuit inspection and > debate in er, um, more, um, politicized settings? > > That and it seems all so very <aol>me too!</aol> When I've seen it working best, the possible expressions of viewpoint are: +1 +0 -0 -1 (and in a community with a benevolent dictator, -10000 or some other large-magnitude negative number). Personally, I know it best from the mailing list devoted to the development of the Python programming language, where Python's creator, like a chair, gives attention to community rough consensus, but unlike a chair has the possibility of overriding the more-or-less rough consensus at times. The possibility of expressing +0 and -0 seems to aid in sorting things out and expressing people's preferences, too; and the expression of -1 without a reasoned explanation of why seems to be frowned upon. I think that the reason why this seems to be a spreading meme could be that when an informed discussion reaches a point where people believe a clear solution is in sight, +1 is a visually very distinct way of saying "Works for me". Henrik _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf