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[Gendispatch] Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottnick-ietf-decisions-00.txt

Pete Resnick <resnick@episteme.net> Tue, 11 August 2026 17:02 UTC

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From: Pete Resnick <resnick@episteme.net>
To: Brian E Carpenter <brian.e.carpenter@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:02:02 -0500
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Subject: [Gendispatch] Re: New Version Notification for draft-nottnick-ietf-decisions-00.txt
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On 10 Aug 2026, at 16:02, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> Another point occurred to me. The IESG and IAB charters don't mention _rough_ consensus. In fact the IAB charter [BCP39] has a voting rule. The IESG charter [RFC3710] has a quite complex discussion of decision-taking and the IESG ballot procedure [1] is pretty complex too.
>
> I think the draft needs to mention the IESG and IAB decision-taking models, even if only to note that neither of them is rough consensus. Specifically, the IESG does not use rough consensus to determine whether there is IETF rough consensus on a document.
>
> [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-ballot-procedures-for-documents/

Well, the "Alternate" procedure is definitely voting, but it's not clear what to call the rest of it, particularly given the discussion here:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/statement-iesg-discuss-criteria-in-iesg-review-20140507/

What the IESG is doing as described here certainly doesn't sound much like voting, and may even be close to the IESG coming to rough consensus, though undoubtedly in a convoluted way.

I wrote this thing a while ago that might be also of interest:

https://wiki.ietf.org/en/group/iesg/archive/ballottheory

I'd prefer that the IESG didn't use a hard number (2/3), but I wonder the number of times that this has even been an issue: How many documents have we had that failed IESG review with > 1/3 Abstains? Any? I suspect if there were sufficient Abstains (or even one total showstopper Abstain), one or two other ADs would pickup a Discuss and things would keep going, for the sake of coming to rough consensus.

The IAB's procedure seems to be "unanimity if possible, consensus otherwise, plus a weird little add on about quorum". The only real "voting rule" has to do with getting rid of the IAB chair, AFAICT.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best

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