"trouble maker"

[Melinda Shore]

> > but it *doesn't* prevent a WG chair from declaring rough consensus.
> It shouldnt. But it does.

Then isn't that a problem with how our chairs operate?  I
think that to a very great extent working groups face a
prisoner's dilemma situation and not all self-interest is
enlightened.  There are countless, I suspect, aspects to
this problem, ranging from consensus process really being
fairly ill-suited to situations in which there's not a
shared commitment to the process itself to working group
chairs not being sure how much authority we've got.  I think
it's extremely useful to talk about how our processes are
failing to deal with participants who refuse to take "no"
for an answer, but for the purposes of the working group and
its follow-on (the solutions group) it's more useful to
focus on how the problem is instantiated within the IETF and
less on the fact that there are some people who are just
plain difficult.

That's a windy way of saying that difficult people aren't a
problem if we've got mechanisms to get our work done anyway.

Melinda