At 8:58 AM +0200 6/15/07, Harald Alvestrand wrote: >But I believe that in neither that page nor in RFC 3935 did we ever commit the fallacy of saying "one man, one vote". >How the weight one gives to opinions is distributed varies, I believe - both from case to case and from person to person - but we've never committed the error of saying "all opinions are equal". > >We are very committed to "all opinions should be HEARD" (we do demand civility, but that is about form, not content), but we've never claimed to weigh them equally. We have espoused "rough consensus and running code" as a credo for a long time, though, and Thomas's most recent formulation (where one well-known contributor is weighted over the opinions of five not-known contributors) does not fit that rubric, at least in my opinion. It sounds like an organization where the old-dogs network runs things and can exclude input from anyone whose opinion doesn't agree with theirs. Since one of the key values of the IETF is openness, we have to be careful with giving that impression; as an open organization where a newcomer is only free to agree with the old dogs isn't worth much. I think part of the part of the problem here is that we're talking about opinions. In a real working group, the chairs can tell who is actually reading the documents, producing text, and coding up implementations. They can weight based on *participation*, in other words, in the chartered work of the group. In a BoF, especially where some of the proposers are new participants or are referring to needs outside the comfort zones of many of our participants, this is much harder. The tendency to weight participation in the *IETF* higher than familiarity with the work means, at least if I'm reading the tea leaves right, that we will be turning away new participants as well as new work. Any one of Thomas's five will likely look at the treatment received in that BoF and decide to work elsewhere. I think BoF reform along the lines Bernard has suggested might help solve that, by creating a phase where participation in the *work* can be judged much as it is in a chartered working group. After a "BoF period", the chairs/ADs/community can better judge who really is familiar with the area, who is working to achieve the proposed work, and who will likely implement and deploy it; those all deserve real weight in our process. That does not mean that those outside the group cannot and should not be heard; intra-area review and cross-area review are a key part of our value. But it allows us to value our new contributors as equals to our known contributors. regards Ted Hardie _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf