On 10/7/14 10:08 AM, Spencer Dawkins at IETF wrote: > Just piling in after Barry here ... and speaking as the AD who had the > most recent ¨draft on a telechat agenda with consensus = unknown¨, but > I'm hardly the only one. > > The field in the tracker is labeled ¨consensus¨, which is ambiguous but > actually means ¨IETF consensus¨. So, it should be set after IETF Last Call. > > A fair number of the documents I've processed already had it set to > ¨yes¨ when they were publication-requested, so that means the > shepherd/working group chairs thought it meant ¨working group consensus¨. > > I believe - but Barry would know - that we've requested that the field > label be changed to ¨IETF Consensus¨ in the datatracker. I think that would be helpful. In this particular case there appear to be two primary sources of confusion: 1) on what the word "consensus" means in terms of process in the datatracker, and 2) that the datatracker is being taken to be normative rather than informative. The first appears to be confusing to a few people and it's great that it's being addressed; I've never seen anybody be confused about the latter before. Doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, but I suspect that it's not a general problem and the lack of a giant red "FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY" label on the datatracker and tools pages does not appear to be an impediment to getting anything done. If this is a more general problem let's do something about it, and if it's not let's drop it and move on. Melinda