Oh definitely. Gaming the system is easy with "consensus in the room"
especially with hums and such.
The IEEE has voting and people allegedly send zombies to raise hands.
There are provisions to protect against that. Anyone can challenge and
claim that there is block voting (people represent themselves and not
their employers, just as in the IETF). The chair has a procedure to
determine whether that is the case and consider all the votes from a
single company as one vote. It's a good deterrent.
The problem with consensus in the room is that it flies in the face of
our mode of operation. If we have to really wait until a meeting to
make decisions, we are introducing tremendous delays into the process;
in that case, we should meet more often. Next, if consensus in the room
is how we want to do it and we are resigned to the fact that some of us
(even those in power misbehave), let's make it fair; let's declare that.
I will then tell everyone who listens to send zombies to the IETF to
hum/vote/whatever.
I hope we haven't come to that!
best,
Lakshminath
On 5/31/2007 1:08 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:
One thing that occurs to me is that in my initial message I implicitly
felt that the room hands/hums were a more accurate assessment of
consensus than the list. I guess that I should fess up that I've always
felt that the "consensus is determined on the list" is something of a
charming myth. Of course if we went with the room consensus,
gaming the system would just be done by different means, so my
feeling shouldn't be taken as endorsement of that as an alternative.
Mike
Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
Oh, I understand cultural sensitivities, but I have never heard of not
wanting to challenge in the public (except the disagreeing with the
employer thing). The problem with that is that if people don't like
something and can't speak up or will only speak through a chair or an
AD, it allows natural avenues for abuse. The chair or the AD might as
well be making decisions at that point.
Even anonymous voting has verifiability as the crucial part of
requirements.
If our consensus process is not independently and openly verifiable,
we might as well close shop!
Lakshminath
PS: BTW, I agree with Melinda that we should not allow a minority to
block progress; in any type of consensus process, unfortunately some
of us will be at the losing end of things.
On 5/31/2007 12:33 PM, Spencer Dawkins wrote:
The alternative - a WG chair who tells the working group that the
apparent WG consensus on the mailing list is being overruled because
of anonymous objections that the WG chair cannot share with the WG,
or because of private objections that the WG chair is "channeling"
from a back room - would make voting seem reasonable (or, to use Mark
Allman's characterization in another thread, "seem charming").
Thanks,
Spencer
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