Re: IETF Last Calls and Godwin-like rules

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On 2/17/12 3:34 PM, Paul Hoffman wrote:
On Feb 17, 2012, at 1:23 PM, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:

On 2/17/12 2:18 PM, Chris Grundemann wrote:

*and I happen to know the person who is doing the agreeing*
I keep hearing statements along these lines and it's a bit
unnerving. Either participation in the IETF is open, or it isn't.
When a person's opinion/view/thoughts/words/etc. are judged
exclusively by "do I know this person" then you have an Old Boys
Club, not an open body.
Chris, I think Pete meant that if he happens to know the personal
context of the person who says "+1" then he can impute some meaning to
it (because he knows the person has been following the discussion,
knows what that person's concerns have been in past threads, etc.). He
is not saying that you need to be part of the club in order to gain a
hearing, only that if he doesn't know you then a mere +1 carries less
(or no) weight with him.
I hope Pete meant something a bit more than that. In specific, I hope he meant:

if he happens to know the personal
context of the person who says "+1" then he can impute some meaning to
it, but if he doesn't know the personal context, then he needs to
put effort into finding it out

+1. ;-)

I think I might be able to decipher what Pete meant. I think Paul and Peter have it mostly right.

If there's an ongoing discussion and on a technical point someone says, "+1", I might know what that means. If the person who said "+1" has been participating in the rest of the conversation and I have the context of what that person knows, what points they've made in the past, etc., then I surely understand how to take the "+1". As I said, not a whole lot of data, but a sanity check on the point being discussed. But if a random participant who has said nothing to date in the discussion simply says, "+1", I have no idea how to give that any weight. Is this someone who was instructed to come along and give a "+1", but has no idea what the technical conversation is about? Or is it an otherwise silent expert on the subject? The only way I can figure out what a "person's opinion/view/thoughts/words/etc." are is for us to engage with eachother. I do not believe that "+1" constitutes engagement. I don't even think, "I support this document" constitutes engagement without a whole lot of other historical context. If you haven't been participating in the conversations, you should not expect your "+1"s to be given much weight.

It is absolutely true that this is an open body. But that doesn't mean it's a voting democracy. It's a consensus organization. Your mere presence doesn't count. It's your participating in the consensus that does. Participating means explaining and objecting and defending and discussing. 'Me too' is not one of those things unless you've already done a lot of engaging already.

That is, in a WG where you are leading a consensus call, if you get a significant number of +1s or -1s from people who haven't participated in the conversation to date, it is your responsibility to try to find out why. "I just got started" is a perfectly good reason, as is "I have been following this silently but this is the first thing I thought was important"; "I was told to join the list and vote" is also context that is good to know.

I'd add that it is also the responsibility of the participants to make sure that they do explain why they have said "+1". This is a human endeavor. I might "+1" something on the expectation that "of course the chair knows who I am and what I know about this topic." The chair may instead be thinking, "OK, so this is some random schmo that his company sent to say 'me too'." That's a fail on both of our parts, not just the chair.

All of this, of course, argues against the proposal that started this thread.

Noting that the supposed "proposal" was hyperbole, I will point to my initial reply to Dave: We still do need to occasionally call out publicly that we all recognize that political 'me toos' don't count. In fact, we ought not do counting at all.

pr

--
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102

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