Deciding between two choices

Melinda Shore mshore@cisco.com
Thu, 19 Dec 2002 16:20:42 -0500


> I've heard, but have not personally witnessed, tales of competing
> proposals de-railing other WGs.  Would anyone like to cite their
> favourite example?

Hi, midcom again.  The task is to choose an existing IETF
protocol to carry action and policy requests to middlebox
devices.  We had five candidates, eliminated two, and were
faced with the problem of choosing from among the three
remaining.  Adding to the difficulty was the influx of
people who suddenly found the problem of middlebox
communication to be particularly compelling and, by the way,
had strong opinions in favor of one or another protocol.

We had produced a protocol evaluation document and the three
remaining candidate protocols were ranked closely but not
equally, so what I ended up doing was putting the onus on
the working group participants to demonstrate convincingly
that the remaining top-ranked protocol couldn't do the job.
If they did we'd move on to the next one, and so on.  As it
turned out the problems with the top-ranked protocol are
addressable and certainly not sufficient to render it
unsuitable.  

The problem is this: we absolutely did *not* arrive at this
decision by consensus, and I would say that it's a minority
of active working group participants who are happy with the
outcome.  The alternative would have been no decision at
all, although some participants wanted to do a midcom
implementation on each of the candidates to see how they'd
work out, which would have left us having to make the same
decision in six months but with participants even more
invested in their favorite protocol.  At any rate we're left
with a protocol that almost certainly is the best choice but
that a substantial number of participants are unhappy with.
It's not a great situation.

I think that clearly choosing from existing thingies is not
something that can be done by consensus in cases where
there's not already a clear winner.  We need to be able to
come up with decision-making processes that work when we
can't come to agreement otherwise.  Part of it may be
learning how to frame questions better.

Melinda