Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 2007-05-31 22:08, 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.
I don't think people unable to travel to meetings would agree. Since our
objective is to discover technical problems with a proposed consensus,
I think it's essential to allow any netizen to raise problems. One
email technical comment pointing out a serious flaw has far more weight
than a hundred people in a room going "mmmmmmm".
It seems that people have read more into my initial idea than I had really
meant. I only meant it to be limited to consensus calls on the mailing list
where somebody might not be comfortable publicly saying their +1.
This is orthogonal to the question of anonymity of somebody who doesn't
feel comfortable bringing up a technical problem on the list ala the example
of Dean on the SIP list recently.
The reason I say it's a charming myth is that the list is pretty lousy
since it's
usually a very small set of people who will speak up. Ie, the protagonists.
At meetings, you get a broader sense including the intensity. As somebody
who hasn't been to the last few IETF's, I well aware of the "not being
there"
part. Still, I think it's a myth that these hums are *just* the sense of
the room
and no more. They're clearly a lot more than that as it almost always brings
a conclusion to some point of contention, and when it's brought up again on
the list you can almost always be guaranteed a "but we decided this in
Oslo!".
Myth, meet reality.
Mike
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