Re: Online 'hum'

--On Sunday, 26 April, 2026 09:25 +1200 Brian E Carpenter
<[email protected]> wrote:

> On 26-Apr-26 06:13, John R Levine wrote:
>> On Sat, 25 Apr 2026, Joel Halpern wrote:
>>> I don't know that we are inherently bound by any particular
>>> slogan.  However, the avoidance of voting still seems to me
>>> to be an extremely good idea.
>> 
>> As ICANN discovered the hard way about 25 years ago, you
>> can't have a meaningful vote if you have no idea who or what
>> the voters are.  I think we all agree that it's a good thing
>> that the only bar we have to participation is the ability to
>> set up an email address, so votes would only be exercises in
>> ever more ways to stuff the ballot box.
>> 
>> R's,
>> John
>> 
>> PS: I'm not saying our processes are anywhere close to
>> perfect, but this isn't one that's broken.
> 
> Yes. The combination of "no kings" and "no voting" is pretty
> unusual (well,
> maybe it goes back partially to classical Athens, but it's
> unusual in modern
> times). It is more than a slogan. Humming is a side-effect.

Concur.  And concur with Michael that point scales would not
help, but for more reasons than he gave.  With
sometime-statistician hat on, those scales are notoriously hard
to evaluate accurately, at least unless one know a lot about the
population that answers.  Otherwise, trying to say almost
anything about the responses of the group leads to averaging,
not apples and oranges, but something rather more like apples
and automobiles. (More detailed explanation on request and when
I have time.) Estimating that about the IETF participant
population takes us back to the rough consensus question.

Given our other constraints, including the one that John Levine
mentioned, we just are not going to get away from somewhat
subjective determination of consensus by chairs.  We do.
however, have more protections against abuse than those
mentioned although we do depend on  the application of good, and
relatively unbiased, sense.   One of the advantages of having
more than one AD in an area is that Nomcoms can choose ones who
don't have exactly the same perspective.  That usually succeeds
and those ADs will often assign a WG or review process to the
one of their number that does not have a beneficial interest in
particular decisions of that WG.  And, if a WG has two or more
Chairs, especially if it is about subject matter for which there
are strong opinions, ADs usually have the sense to make Chair
choices that reflect different points of view, rather than
having two or three people who almost always hum in harmony.  If
those sorts of general principles are not applied, we don't have
a WG Chair problem, we have a AD --or full IESG-- problem.

While I think the "hum" function in Meetecho could be improved,
and that both participants and WG Chairs probably need more
practice with it, I doubt that we can do much better, at least
as long as chairs and others remember the rule about decisions
and consensus being determined (not just ratified) on mailing
list, not in meetings.

   john