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

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Thu Jul 17 11:56:09 CEST 2003



--On 16. juli 2003 15:01 +0200 Brian E Carpenter <brian at hursley.ibm.com> 
wrote:

> Scott W Brim wrote:
>>
>> I like the idea that Chairs should document why they declared consensus
>> (or the lack of it).
>
> Agreed. But another thing that may be going on is Chairs making consensus
> calls too late.

I think the problem WG meeting's discussion of the problem document on 
Tuesday actually was a fairly telling example of some of the subtleties of 
the rough consensus process.

We had a number of "issues thought to be open".
On every issue, we had a large number of speakers, trying to improve the 
WG's understanding that the issue was indeed real, and exploring subtle 
ramifications of the issue. People just observing the people at the mike, 
and not having read the drafts, would have a hard time detecting what the 
consensus of the room was.

But when the WG chair called for consensus on *whether the document text 
was a good enough description of the issue*, the consensus of the room was 
pretty clear - on some issues, near-unanimous consent that it was good 
enough; on other issues, a clearly divided opinion that means that the 
issue has to be rehashed on the list.

Calling consensus after just listening to the discussion is very hard.
Calling consensus after asking a specific question and seeing the response 
is a lot easier - and a LOT easier to record.

My 2 cents....

                     Harald



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