Deciding between two choices

[Margaret Wasserman]

The IETF is bad at deciding between two different proposals to meet
the same technical need.  Often, we are bad at making decisions
at all, and when we do make decisions, we have trouble making them
stick.

I think that is all part of the same problem, and may be the
biggest and most severe problem facing the IETF right now.  It
leads to the very long document cycles in WGs, the need to
continually step back and re-examine our assumptions, and many
of the other problems that have been discussed on this list.

I think that this may be an artifact of our "rough consenus"
decision making process.  "Rough consensus" probably worked well
when the IETF was a small group of like-minded individuals with
a few strong leaders with a fairly consistent world-view.  But,
I don't think it is serving us very well today.

Margaret