On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 06:45:03PM -0500, Ofer Inbar wrote: > IETF decisions don't get made by counting votes, as you know. > There's no value in having lots and lots of people write to say > essentially the same thing - it just annoys list members, but > doesn't actually contribute to the discussion. I'm not sure I agree with that claim. It's true that decisions are not made by counting votes. Decisions _are_ supposed to be made, during consensus call, by weighing the arguments and the apparent support for the document. The document is in last call, and the discussion is taking place on this list. The cost of that is that, if a large number of people are opposed to publication of a document all for the same reason, they all have to post basically the same argument in order for their opinion to count. Those responsible for determining consensus may, of course, take into account the level of technical understanding apparent in the posted messages when weighing them. The cost of being a loosely-organized group of individuals, working by mailing list, is that sometimes we have to put up with volumes of mail due to contentious topics on the list. If we don't like that, we need to change IETF rules so that we have club membership and better screening of participants for qualification. I won't speculate on whether that would represent an improvement over the way the IETF has worked so far. A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf