Re: how to contact the IETF

[Wes Hardaker <[e-mail]>]

>>>>> On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 07:20:39 -0500, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> said:

AS> I'm not sure I agree with that claim.  It's true that decisions are
AS> not made by counting votes.  Decisions _are_ supposed to be made,
AS> during consensus call, by weighing the arguments and the apparent
AS> support for the document.

And the question is: did all those people writing in read and understand
the draft and fully understand the issue?  Or are they just
regurgitating a "do this" announcement.  How do you weigh a bunch of
uninformed responses against a fewer number of informed ones.

Personally, I'm not sure I agree the draft is good to go precisely
because I haven't read enough information on both the draft, the
potential patent and the pseudo-grant so I haven't voiced my opinions
about it (until now...  whooops).

We ask all the time in the IETF meetings "who's read the draft".  We
rarely follow up low-number responses with questions of "who believes
it's ready for publication" when the number of readers is very low.
That's the situation we're in now: a lot fewer people have read and
understand the various documents than are weighing in on the subject.

Do we consider consensus based on "+1" comments or based on the opinions
of only the more informed readers.  And what do we do when it becomes
impossible to determine who is who?
-- 
Wes Hardaker
Sparta, Inc.