Re: Old directions in social media.

[Kyle Rose <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2021 at 12:32 PM Michael Thomas <[e-mail]> wrote:

> If anybody can send a pull request of whatever magnitude and it is pulled
> by the editors, that's a process problem. That's allowing a backdoor to the
> process of achieving consensus. Yes it happens now regardless of git, but
> that doesn't make it a good thing.


But that is also not how it works. First of all, I assume authors are
acting in good faith: if there is a major change proposed, they're not
going to apply it without understanding how the WG feels about it. But even
if they're not acting in good faith, a bad change will eventually be
discovered by someone doing a diff or a review. While the "rough" in "rough
consensus" refers to the inability to get unanimity on anything, it seems
like it also permits a bit of leeway in terms of determining consensus for
purposes of efficiency and making progress: based on prior discussions in a
WG and the deep knowledge authors have about both the material and the
views of others in the WG, some changes are obviously going to be
non-controversial, so authors often use their judgment to apply them
without actually asking on the list. Bad faith actors and misjudgments will
still be discovered.

Note that this is a separate issue from fragmentation/participants not
knowing about all the work going on that they might have opinions about. I
don't see that as a GitHub workflow or minor change issue so much as an
issue of there being so much work that no one can keep track of it all.

Kyle