Re: Last Call: <draft-resnick-on-consensus-05.txt> (On Consensus and Humming in the IETF) to Informational RFC

[Loa Andersson <[e-mail]>]

On 2013-10-09 20:35, Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Oct 9, 2013, at 1:30 AM, Melinda Shore <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> Rough consensus - An agreement by almost everyone that the proposed
>>
>> That's a lot like voting, I think.
>
> It's worse than voting, because it encourages people to invite their friends to sway the consensus.   At least with voting you have the transparency of knowing who the electorate is.   So if this were what "rough consensus" meant, rough consensus would most often be won by whoever has the most friends, which in practice is probably whoever works for the biggest company.  So whatever "rough consensus" means, it can't mean "only a few people disagree."
>

OK - I don't know what is wrong, but either
- I can't write; or
- some leading members of our community can't or don't care to read

Ted,

what you are describing is is not a "group", it is a group or a loosely
collection of people subject to manipulation.

There is no room for that type of manipulation if we shall be able to
talk about consensus/rough consensus (at least we seem to agree on
that).

If we have wg-chairs, ADs or chairs that are not able to detect this
kind of manipulation we are in bad shape.

What I tried to talk about is the the state of mind the (un-manipulated) 
group needs to be in before someone can make a
consensus call; again not a definition, just a way of thinking about
it.

With that I rest my case.

/Loa


-- 


Loa Andersson                        email: [e-mail]
Senior MPLS Expert                          [e-mail]
Huawei Technologies (consultant)     phone: [phone]