On Jun 24, 2011, at 5:40 AM, Stephen Farrell wrote: > > Basically, I approached this the way Peter did. One further > point below though. > > On 24/06/11 02:15, Paul Hoffman wrote: >> Said a different way, what needs to happen in IETF Last Call to overcome "we already discussed this in the WG" (which was the majority of the positive comments in this case)? Does a non-WG member need to do more, and if so what? > > In addition to the other factors already mentioned, I didn't > see what I thought were significant new facts or issues being > raised at the IETF LC. I think that such things are perhaps > more likely to cause the IETF rough consensus to differ from > that in the WG. In this case, it looked to me like people > were bringing concerns already expressed in the WG to the > attention of the wider community, which is a reasonable thing > to do in cases like this where the WG consensus was already > fairly rough. > > It could well be that I know so little about 6to4 that I was > wrong in that conclusion of course, but then there's so much > about which I know so little that I've gotten used to living > with that risk;-) It's problematic, and I believe inappropriate, to consider WG consensus as contributing to community consensus. The two questions need to be considered separately, for two reasons: 1. Working groups often have strong biases and aren't representative of the whole community. Put another way, a working group often represents only one side of a tussle, and working groups are often deliberately chartered in such a way as to minimize the potential for conflict within the group. So when evaluating standards actions for the whole community, the consensus within a working group means little. In this particular case, v6ops heavily represents the interests of operators (who are naturally interested in having IPv6 run smoothly in the long term) and works against the interests of applications developers (who are naturally interested in having transition mechanisms that allow them to ship code that uses IPv6 and an IPv6 programming model regardless of whether the underlying network supports it). 2. Working groups have spent a lot of time working on a document and will have several members actively participating. By contrast, most of the wider community will not have these issues "on their radar" until they come up for IETF-wide Last Call. Also, busy people need to find time to review a document before making comments, and this may require multiple readings. So it's hardly surprising if the number of IETF-wide Last Call comments is smaller than the number of WG Last Call comments. Consensus needs to be evaluated separately in the WG and the IETF because the populations and sample sizes are different. Keith _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf