Documenting consensus (RE: making strategic problems concrete)

[Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law]

As you note, well-run WGs have chairs who do minute their findings of
consensus via a post to the list.  Perhaps the problem you identify is 1)
not all chairs do this and 2) even when they do, it can get lost in the
clutter of a busy list's traffic.

Perhaps among the best practices that WG chairs might be given should be a
list of standard-form subject lines to use when doing certain things, such
as announcing consensus?  This would serve two purposes: list itself would
be a sort of checklist of the stages of the RFC process for chairs, and
the standard subject lines would make it easier for anyone searching the
archives to find things.

Which brings me to one of my favorite hobby horses.  Mailing list archives
are NOT always preserved. They vanish.  Is there some way the IAB could
contact archive.org or someone like that and get them to archive all the
mailing lists in an organized way?

On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

> 
> 
> --On mandag, mars 24, 2003 00:00:25 -0800 Dave Crocker <dhc at dcrocker.net> 
> wrote:
> 
> > Harald,
> >
> > HTA> Is there a real problem in that we don't have any means recognized
> > by the HTA> process of documenting the "consensus of the moment" except
> > by people's HTA> memories?
> >
> > good question.
> >
> > well-run working groups have chairs that are regularly assessing and
> > declaring working group.  These actions are recorded in meeting
> > minutes or on the mailing list archive.
> >
> > Do we need a different, formal mechanism?
> >
> > Perhaps the problem is merely that we do not train chairs to do this
> > enough and do not check that they are doing it?
> >
> > Is this a mechanism problem or a training problem?
> 
> There's certainly a training issue here.
> 
> But speaking as someone who has all too little ability to actively 
> participate in our working groups, and all too much reason to want to dive 
> into a working group to find out what's happening at times, I think it's 
> also a mechanism problem - in order to find out what good work the chairs 
> have been doing in asserting and documenting consensus, I either have to 
> scan mailing list archives or figure out where *this* working group keeps 
> its non-standard extra web pages (or whatever other mechanism it uses).
> 
> the most acute problem is when consensus is found between meetings - 
> something we definitely want to encourage.
> 
>                       Harald
> 
> 

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