Deciding between two choices

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On torsdag, desember 19, 2002 16:20:42 -0500 Melinda Shore 
<mshore@cisco.com> wrote:

> 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............................. 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.

the critical point for declaring rough consensus is probably to have a 
clear majority of the group agree up front that a decision has to be made.
If in luck, you can get the "losers" to accept that going forward with one 
is preferable to not coming out with anything.

The (in)famous example of IPSec key management is often cited as "25 people 
wanted IKE, 25 people wanted SKIP, 250 people wanted a decision".
In fact, Photuris is published as RFCs too, now - but nobody uses it.

In the SNMPv2 wars, despite Dave's opinion, many of us thought we saw the 
market making a very explicit choice to stick with SNMPv1 until *we* made a 
decision. The problem wasn't that the alternatives weren't available or 
weren't well documented - it was that the market refused to adopt any of 
them.

"Urgency to come up with a solution" is probably a critical point.