Subject: RE: Binary Choices?

From: "Gray, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 12:57:56 -0500

Sam/Sandy,

	See below...

--
Eric

--- [SNIP] --- 
-->     Sandy>     Unfortunately, there seems to be a religious dogma
-->     Sandy> among the long-time IETF participants that they never take
-->     Sandy> votes.  All they do is judge rough or smooth concensus, and
-->     Sandy> that reduces our options to simple binary choices.  
--> 
--> I'm very confused here; as far as I can tell judging consensus works
--> much better with things in the middle than any sort of votes.

Ultimately, you're both right.

Usually, before you can actually seek consensus, you must have an
essentially "binary" choice.  It is hard enough to reach consensus
on simple choices without turning up the process noise by having a
plethora of possible choices.

However, the process of seeking consensus does tend to solicit the
reasons and feelings involved in making choices and this can lead
to solution searches in the "gray-areas" between proposals.

--> 
--> --Sam
--> 
--> 
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From: "Theodore Ts'o" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 22:43:18 -0500

> plethora of possible choices.

I disagree here.  The process of seeking consensus means you have to
sort *through* the plethora of possible choices, and see which ones
meets the needs and requirements of the stakeholder.  If you have a
binary choice, all you can really do is force a vote.  So hopefully by
the time that you come up to your last two choices, they hopefully
aren't "binary" in the sense of 0 and 1 being diametric opposites.
Hopefully the two or three final choices are pretty closely except for
a few minor details (and then we end up spending huge amount of time
arguing over those tiny details :-)

						- Ted