Re: Alternative decision process in RTCWeb

[Melinda Shore <[e-mail]>]

On 12/1/13 8:01 AM, Ted Hardie wrote:
> For what it's worth, all the chairs agree that failure to get consensus
> is a valid outcome and it may be where we end up.  The internal
> discussion among the chairs and RAI ADs was extremely extensive and not
> at all fun; think soul-searching, beating of breasts, tearing of sack
> cloth, and wearing of ashes.   Trust us that we did not do this lightly;
> as one of us put it in the internal discussion: "We're going to get an
> epic beat down for this".

You did not receive an "epic beat down" although I think you
probably should have (or something like one).  What you did
was huge and has impacts far outside the scope of one
decision in one working group.

Look, I've been feeling for some time that our decision-making
structures don't work for us anymore - that there are too many
people looking for optimal personal outcomes (as opposed to
optimal organizational, good-for-the-internet outcomes), there
aren't enough people invested in a healthy process, and that
it's become incredibly difficult - too difficult - to reach
decisions in a contested space.  However, changing decision-
making to a voting-based process assumes changes to the
organization that I think are devastating.  When we distinguish
between those who are eligible to vote and those who aren't
we create a membership, and when we vote and have a membership
we enter into the very nasty problem of balancing what I think
is our most important organizational characteristic - openness -
against the problem of ballot box stuffing.

We were quite successful in minimizing the impact of the EFF-
motivated mailing list deluge on the TLS authz patent, which
I don't think we could have done if we'd been using the
processes you've invented.  We certainly wouldn't have been
able to have a good outcome in nvo3.  Speaking of which, that
working group was deadlocked for quite awhile but managed their
way out of it without going to a voting model.

I think that we're not that far away from needing to take
a long, hard look at how we're structured with an eye towards
what we need to do to maintain our openness while remaining
effective.  I think the particular situation in WebRTC, with
a roll-your-own voting process, is absolutely the wrong
context for doing that - it needs to be done at the pace at
which it needs to be done and it needs to be done thoughtfully
and thoroughly, and not because one particular working group
can't figure out how to go forward but needs something now.

Melinda