How we decide that we have decided (was: Re: Sampling)

Melinda Shore mshore at cisco.com
Thu Jul 31 09:32:32 CEST 2003


> (1) It had better be possible to talk about, and question, the 
> quality of a claimed consensus.  

Sampling is an awful way to determine consensus (indeed,
it's nearly antithetical to consensus process) and while I
think it's clearly appropriate to talk about problems
inherent in having a self-selected group of individual
determine organizational direction I'm going to quibble and
say that the issue here is participation bias, not sampling
bias.

That said, I'm also somewhat concerned to see people saying
that at the plenary there was consensus to ask the IESG to
handle the reform process.  There was a very large minority
who didn't agree, and from where I sat it didn't look very
much like even a very, very rough consensus.  However I
don't think we're going to be able to come to consensus on
how to move forward and that we need to think about
alternatives to consensus to come to a decision.  I think
I'm comfortable with the sort of votes that were taken at
the plenary - they're certainly better than the alternatives
I can think of.

> (5) Let me conclude with a personally-troubling example of how 
> some of this works.  Melinda has sent out two messages to try to 
> validate the meeting "hums".  That is a legitimate thing for a 
> WG Chair to do in the process of trying to determine consensus. 
> I've read both messages, thought about responding on the several 
> issues in which my personal opinions are different from the 
> consensus she has identified, and decided to not do so.  Why? 
> Because in my personal opinion, this WG has been extremely 
> helpful in discussing and focusing on the issues, but has now 
> passed sufficiently far into the range of diminishing returns to 
> have outlived its usefulness.   If I were the AD, I'd be trying 
> to deliver a "wrap this up before I shut it down; it shouldn't 
> drag out much longer" message.

Working groups are not asked to go out, kick around a few
ideas, and come to agreement on them.  They're asked to
produce documents.  We've been through the kick-around-a-
few-ideas phase and we're now in the process of trying to
finalize our documents.  It's our intention that the next
version of the problem-statement document will go into last
call, so I should *certainly* hope that we're now producing
diminishing returns.

Melinda


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