Re: Making Decisions in the IETF

Hi SM,

On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 04:04:00PM -0700, S Moonesamy wrote:
> Hi Mark, Pete,
> 
> I read the draft about "Making Decisions in the IETF".

I assume this refers to draft-nottnick-ietf-decisions?

> Section 1 of the draft states that the guidance in RFC 2418 has served the
> IETF well for more than thirty years.  It then goes on to argue that the
> IETF has grown and the decisions made are more than ever relevant to
> society.
> 
>   (a) It's not often that one finds guidance which has served a group well
> for over
>       thirty years.  Why is the guidance no longer working as it did thirty
> years ago?

I'm not either Mark or Pete, but I would argue that we have at least one
worked example of the original guidance not working well
(draft-ietf-tls-mlkem) and it seems totally reasonable to use that as a
prompt to provide better guidance.

>   (b) What changed in the group as it grew?
> 
>   (c) What is the difference in the decisions made thirty years ago and
> those taken
>       nowadays?
> 
> Section 1.1 has the following: "decision making by voting is inappropriate
> -- it would make our processes vulnerable to rule by majority and vote
> stuffing."  I followed a few working groups today.  There was voting in a
> few of those working groups.  If I read the text from the draft literally, I
> would conclude that there was something inappropriate going on.

I don't think your description of what you observed provides enough
information to be able to really answer the question.  It might indicate
something inappropriate, or it might just be a proxy for soliciting
objections and assesing support, and such a proxy is probably fine in the
absence of objections.

> Section 2 of the draft has the following: "groups SHOULD maintain a record
> of decisions".   Are there cases where a group does not have to record a
> decision?
> 
> Section 3 of the draft states that adoption does not consensus.  I thought
> that little gem was fairly well-known.  That is not reflected in the various
> mailing list discussions which I have seen.

Are you proposing a change to the draft?


Having been prompted to look at the draft, I also have some comments not
inspired by SM's review.

On the whole, I think it's broadly aligned with my understanding of what a
WG chair is supposed to be doing when gauging consensus.

However, I find parts of 2.3 (Handling Objections) underwhelming, largely
relating to the assumption that any given objection must either be upheld
or discounted, and also about what constitutes grounds for discounting an
objection.

In particular, the document is silent on the class of scenarios where there
is a tradeoff between two or more options that have different strengths and
weaknesses, with objections raised as to the weaknesses of each option.  I
do not think it is correct (in the general case) to say that all the
objections are upheld and the WG can do nothing; the WG should be able to
make some decision.  If we take that as the premise, that leads to a
situation where we have a valid objection that we choose to ignore for
other reasons, e.g., as part of a tradeoff between options.

When consensus callers are faced with such a tradeoff situation, I think
the guidance should be roughly that the tradeoff needs to be considered in
the scope of the identified use cases (which implicitly weakens the
position of unidentified use cases), probably weighted by the number of
impacted end users if needed (see RFC 8890 for the IAB's take), while
trying to enable as many use cases as possible to achieve some kind of
useful (even if not optimal) result and minimize the number of use cases
that experience drastic harm from the given choice (as compared to some
other alternative choice).  I would also generally expect the tradeoff
to be described in some form in the resulting document (presumably with
some exceptions possible).

I also think it would be helpful to give guidance to consensus callers on
how to convey the results of the decision to the group, e.g., what
information needs to be included, how to describe the decision process,
what tradeoffs and use-cases were weighed against each other.  IIRC it took
a significnat amount of time to produce summaries like
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/2QHMMX9g5vpFJaeH0okj40N3WjQ/ but
I only remember ever getting positive feedback about having produced them.

-Ben