Subject: +1

From: Michael Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 04:13:18 -0700

Is it just in my part of the ietf woods, or is this becoming a widespread
phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

On the one hand, it can be really difficult to get a feel for consensus on
a mailing list where silence may mean agreement, boredom with the
topic, or just... silence. And then there's the general problem that since
we're engineers  articulations of agreement generally start with some
form of "it depends". So maybe a short hand way of saying "this is
good enough for me, let's not go into the weeds by my agreeing for
potentially different reasons" is a generally Good Thing.

On the other hand, it sure seems like this sort of thing can be gamed.
That is, somebody posts something and three or four of the usual suspect
chime in with their +1 and lo and behold it looks a lot more like consensus
than the previous "it depends" tomes. But is it really consensus, or is it
just (benignly) a way for the usual suspects to signal to each other that
they are willing live with another's proposal (which is not to say that
that is necessarily a small thing in itself)? And what about when it's not
benign? Could it be that +1 could be a way to short circuit inspection and
debate in er, um, more, um, politicized settings?

That and it seems all so very <aol>me too!</aol>

       Mike

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From: "David Harrington" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:08:29 -0400

And what happens if somebody responds with a +2?

Is there anything useful this mailing list could discuss?

dbh 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Thomas [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2006 7:13 AM
> To: IETF Discussion
> Subject: +1
> 
>

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 09:12:40 -0400

Hi Michael,

> That and it seems all so very <aol>me too!</aol>

When I've seen it working best, the possible expressions of viewpoint
are:  +1  +0  -0  -1   (and in a community with a benevolent dictator,
-10000 or some other large-magnitude negative number).

Personally, I know it best from the mailing list devoted to the development
of the Python programming language, where Python's creator, like a chair,
gives attention to community rough consensus, but unlike a chair has
the possibility of overriding the more-or-less rough consensus at times.

The possibility of expressing +0 and -0 seems to aid in sorting things
out and expressing people's preferences, too; and the expression of -1
without a reasoned explanation of why seems to be frowned upon.

I think that the reason why this seems to be a spreading meme could be
that when an informed discussion reaches a point where people believe a
clear solution is in sight, +1 is a visually very distinct way of saying
"Works for me".

	Henrik

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 17:01:46 +0200

> Is there anything useful this mailing list could discuss?
What a DUMB question from such a SMART guy.  Of *course* not.  Here is
Eliot's topic guide to the IETF mailing list:

   1. NATs are {stupid,necessary}
   2. The venue [network] {rocks,sucks}
   3. This list sucks
   4. ASCII is [not] good enough
   5. Why are there so {many,few} meetings in the US?

We could probably form a working group to give numbers to all the logic
behind the various arguments, and then one could compile/compress a
message into something like

1 necessary.  35.
2 sucks. 18.

And Dave, you're just the man to do this!  I'm telling you this thing
has MIB and OID written all over it!

;-)

Eliot

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 22:45:13 -0700

> they are willing live with another's proposal 

"usual suspects"?

what ARE you talking about?

"signal to each other that they are willing to live with another's proposal"?

i could have sworn that "signaling" support was exactly what we were supposed to
be doing.

d/

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From: Tim Bray <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2006 01:02:38 -0700

> phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Over in Atompub, this has become the normal idiom for reacting to  
proposals, with common usages such as +/- 0 and 0.5.   We even use it  
to do WG surveys when there are multiple apparently-plausible options  
on the table.  "Rough consensus" may occasionally be deduced from the  
presence of quite a few +1's and almost no -1's.  It seems to work OK.

For example, "-0" is an awful lot fewer bytes than "I don't like  
that, but I won't lie down in the road over it".

Obviously, everyone multiples the numeric quantity by their own  
estimate of the credibility of the person uttering it.

  -Tim