Hi Pete,
At 13:37 10-06-2013, Pete Resnick wrote:
A month ago, we had another very senior member of the community post
just such a message (in that case directly to the IESG) in response
to a different Last Call. I took that senior member of the community
to task for it. But apparently Russ either disagrees with my
complaint or didn't notice that discussion on the IESG list, so I
think it's worth airing here in public:
I don't expect IAB or IESG members to be infallible, i.e. they are
individuals after all.
A statement such as the above is almost entirely useless to me as an
IESG member trying to determine consensus. It is content-free.
Yes.
We don't vote in the IETF, so a statement of support without a
reason is meaningless. We should not be encouraging folks to send
such things, and having the IAB chair do so is encouraging bad
behavior. Had I not known Russ and his particular expertise, I would
have no reason to take it into consideration *at all*. We should not
have to determine the reputation of the poster to determine the
weight of the message. Even given my background knowledge of who
Russ is, I cannot tell from that message which one of the following
Russ is saying:
The comment was from an individual. The issue is that if you do a
blind review of the messages you don't know who sent the message and
the only weight you could give is to the content of the message.
I think we should stop with these one-line statements of support.
They don't add anything to the consensus call. I'm disappointed that
Russ contributed to this pattern.
I agree that one-line statements are not of much use. It's more
tedious to write a statement to support a proposal than an objection
to it. Non-silent Last Calls usually draw objections. It's going to
be difficult to balance that if one-line statements of support (or
objections) are not considered in a determination of consensus.
Regards,
-sm