Michael,
I am definitely with you.
In practice, at least in some instances, it appears that the "decisions"
are being made in meetings and you are right too there is that, but we
have decided this in Timbuktu (did we ever meet there ;) ) or nowadays
just the "fear" of it and people seem to say nothing when someone (AD or
chair) declares that something was decided at a meeting.
In the interest of being fair, now I have seen in one contentious INT
area WG where the sense of the room was taken at a meeting (it was
counting numbers, err, vote) and then verified on the list -- a few
additional people spoke up -- and finally the consensus was declared.
Now that I can live with. Everyone had a chance to say their piece and
the decision was made. Kudos to the chairs and AD for making that happen.
Finally, I will note that, if we look at the overall numbers, the
consensus process seems to work alright (heavily skewed by "I don't care
one way or another"), but I think if we look at all the contentious
situations and tally them up, we may find a different story.
regards,
Lakshminath
On 6/1/2007 9:52 AM, Michael Thomas wrote:
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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