Subject: RE: objection to proposed change to "consensus"

From: "Gray, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2006 16:31:33 -0500

Sam,

	It is useful sometimes to differentiate those who have
no stake in a particular issue from those who are not paying
attention.  Sometimes (maybe most of the time) it is not a 
very important distinction, and the IETF treats it this way 
all of the time.  Maybe that's the right way to go.  Maybe not.

--
Eric

--> -----Original Message-----
--> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
--> On Behalf Of Sam Hartman
--> Sent: Friday, January 06, 2006 10:51 AM
--> To: Spencer Dawkins
--> Cc: IETF General Discussion Mailing List
--> Subject: Re: objection to proposed change to "consensus"
--> 
--> >>>>> "Spencer" == Spencer Dawkins <[email-masked]> writes:
--> 
-->     Spencer> So... here's the problem.
-->     >> Personally, I object to the suggestion that my 
--> "vote" should be
-->     >> counted one way or another if I am silent.  At most, 
--> it should
-->     >> be counted as "no strong opinion".  Or should I now start
-->     >> responding to all the Last Calls with "I don't care 
--> about this,
-->     >> so please don't count me as supporting it"?
--> 
-->     Spencer> Our technology support for "do we have consensus"
-->     Spencer> stinks. We ask for feedback to a mailing list, knowing
-->     Spencer> that "me, too" postings are (and should be) discouraged
-->     Spencer> in most shared e-mail environments. What we get is
-->     Spencer> exactly what you described - postings from a non-random
-->     Spencer> subset of participants, and then we try to figure out
-->     Spencer> what the sampling error is, and in which 
--> direction, based
-->     Spencer> on not a lot more information. There is a safety
-->     Spencer> mechanism, because when we REALLY miscount we can be
-->     Spencer> appealed, but we don't use it often, and it's really an
-->     Spencer> expensive mechanism to use.
--> 
--> I'm not sure I consider this very broken.  If I'm reading a 
--> last call
--> and I have opinions that differ from the way the discussion 
--> is going,
--> I'm certainly going to speak up.  It seems to work fairly well in
--> practice at determining rough consensus when there is a rough
--> consensus to be determined.  It gives questionable results in cases
--> where the results are questionable; I'm not sure this a bug.
--> 
-->     Spencer> some way to let people say "you know, I just 
--> don't care",
-->     Spencer> that would help, too.
--> 
--> And what do we do with those people anyway?  How would it help me to
--> know there are 30 people who don't care?
--> 
--> 
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---

From: Sandy Wills <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 23:11:10 -0500

Gray, Eric wrote:

> attention.
(rest of post snipped)

Here I must become two-faced.

    Personally, I agree with you.  Often, there are many shades
of grey between the white and black binary choices.  Often,
being able to communicate those shades of grey will be essential
to creating a usable compromise.

    Unfortunately, there seems to be a religious dogma among the
long-time IETF participants that they never take votes.  All they
do is judge rough or smooth concensus, and that reduces our options
to simple binary choices.  Thus, my attempt to create a binary
method for asserting and testing a claim of concensus.

    I truly believe that we will have to go to some kind of multiple-
choice voting system to reach decisions in these multi-valued cases.
   We have already seen a couple of examples on this list, where
someone set up an opinion poll on the web, and later reported the
results.  Of course, in order for us to actually use them, they
would have to be hosted by the IETF, or the "winners" of any poll
would spend the rest of their lives fighting off charges of cheating.

-- 
Unable to locate coffee.
Operator halted.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 15:02:48 +0100

(changing the subject since the subject is changed...)

> method for asserting and testing a claim of concensus.

I wouldn't call it "religious", but it's part of the package deal that 
allows us to get away with not having members, and being very hard to take 
over effectively...... as soon as there's a set of rules, and a mechanistic 
method for deciding on the outcome of a decision, the price of buying an 
IETF decision becomes a known quantity instead of a "you might try, but 
you're unlikely to get away with it if someone catches you" uncertainty.

That said... I like opinion polls, of various forms, and use them 
frequently (some would say "too frequently"... I guess I've demonstrated 
most of the bad sides of opinion polls over the years...).
In the good cases, they allow us to quickly and clearly distinguish the 
pattern of opponents and proponents. In the bad case, they confirm what we 
already knew - that the group is deadlocked and unable to make a decision.

That's the time to pull out Ted Hardie's RFC 3929 and look for some 
alternate methods - majority voting isn't listed there, and for good reason.

                       Harald

---

From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 09:19:03 -0500

> most of the bad sides of opinion polls over the years...).

a useful function

> pattern of opponents and proponents. In the bad case, they confirm what
> we already knew - that the group is deadlocked and unable to make a
> decision.

that too

---

From: Melinda Shore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 10:14:38 -0500

> method for asserting and testing a claim of concensus.

I think part of the problem we're having with decision making (to
the extent that we're having a problem with decision-making) is that
too many people really don't understand consensus at all.  Consensus
process leads to decisions being made through synthesis and
restatement, and by the time that the question is asked "Do we have
consensus?" we should pretty much have consensus already.  Consensus
is not a form of voting with overwhelming results, and I think that's
where you're going somewhat far afield.

Sometimes I think the IETF should change its decision-making processes -
if nothing else, consensus-style decision-making doesn't work that
well when some number of participants don't share the same investment
in the process itself.  But even so, I think better training of both
participants and chairs would probably solve the bulk of the problems
that have come up and should be tried before the organization gives
serious consideration to changing how decisions are made.

Melinda

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:27:26 -0500

>>>>> "Sandy" == Sandy Wills <[email-masked]> writes:

    Sandy> Gray, Eric wrote:
    >> It is useful sometimes to differentiate those who have no stake
    >> in a particular issue from those who are not paying attention.
    Sandy> (rest of post snipped)

    Sandy> Here I must become two-faced.

    Sandy>     Personally, I agree with you.  Often, there are many
    Sandy> shades of grey between the white and black binary choices.
    Sandy> Often, being able to communicate those shades of grey will
    Sandy> be essential to creating a usable compromise.

Agreed.

    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.

--Sam