[Fwd: Re: rough consensus (was Re: "trouble maker")]

[Ted Lemon]

On Wednesday 16 July 2003 16:43, Erik Guttman wrote:
> Voicing effective criticism often requires full engagement with WG
> discussion to participate *at all*.  We often lack time to do that.
> I believe that this is largely due to a failure on the part of WG
> chairs to document decisions and what led up to them.  Given such a
> document, we (as lurkers/outsiders) can take issue or agree *with the
> document* without needing to master the huge volume of correspondence
> which preceded it.

I am concerned that those who participate in this way may not get a helpful 
summary from the wg chair, since the arguments are necessarily filtered 
through the chair's understanding of the situation, and will tend to be 
colored by the chair's leanings on the matter.

This seems like it's proposed as a solution to the problem of a too-loud 
objector on the wg mailing list, but I don't think that it solves the 
problem.   My personal experience from having seen this solution implemented 
is that I do not think it successfully captures a consensus.   When I saw 
this implemented in zeroconf, my impression was that it degenerated into a 
simple majority vote, which is not the same thing as rough consensus.