Plenary decision?

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 12:35:21PM -0700, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> I am confused, are we in agreement here that there is no body that
> is competent to decide this issue or not?
> 
> You seem to be arguing here that the plenary is not the appropriate
> forum to discuss the issue, but that its 'decision' on the matter
> should be respected even though nobody was aware that there was 
> any decision being made.
> 
> What I am looking for is an open process. I do not see one.

The plenary is the appropriate place to discuss the issue, and in fact
it represent a particular equine that has been bludgeoned to death
many times before, and will no doubt be bludgeoned to death many times
in the future.  As I said, I can't remember a time when the people
present who went up to mike to defend ASCII numbered less than at
least 3 times number of people who wanted to use some propietary
(i.e., MS Word) or non-editable (i.e., Postscript) formats.

Of course, the tools and formats keep changing, and although I
personally find Docbook to be infuriating because the tools all suck,
at least there are some open formats that actually have some promise
of providing better formatting for people who are must have
pretty-printed standards.  So certainly it's fair to hold repeat
equinocides from time to time.  

The current process is that the IETF leadership takes the input from
the plenary, and cogitates on it, and based on their determination of
community consensus, takes action.  Is it open?  It depends on your
definition of "open", I suppose.  No one took votes, so if a
democratic approach is the only way of determining openness, I suppose
it wasn't open.  However, there certainly was an opportunity to gether
community input, and at least in this case, I believe the overwhelming
community input was indeed respected.

So the question is whether or not the way this particular issue turned
out is a reason to indict the current process.  I don't think it is.
Give what I've seen of the people who have expressed their views at
the microphone, if we had a vote, it probably would have been
decisively in favor of ASCII.

					- Ted