Re: Alternative decision process in RTCWeb

[Eric Burger <[e-mail]>]

No: this is what the sort of statement get *me* an epic beat down:
	Why do this sort of thing here when you can do it in 3GPP? ETSI has membership, voting, and the whole mobile and telco crowd.

If I cannot tell the difference between IETF and 3GPP and 3GPP procedures, it is time to go home.

On Dec 1, 2013, at 12:01 PM, Ted Hardie <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 30, 2013 at 7:54 AM, Melinda Shore <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On 11/30/13 4:45 AM, Roger Jørgensen wrote:
> > And if the problem is that bad, that it's impossible to reach
> > consensus in the WG, what about replacing the chairs? ...
> 
> Not for failure to gain consensus, by any means.  "No consensus,
> do nothing" is a legitimate (if frustrating) outcome.  I think
> they showed really questionable judgment in calling for a vote
> and laying out eligibility criteria, and for me that's a huge issue
> (congratulations, guys - just like that you changed us into a
> member organization) but failure to gain consensus is a valid
> outcome.
> 
> 
> 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".
> 
> So why did we put ourselves forward for that?  Because we're charged as WG to make the WebRTC ecosystem as complete and strong as we can.  if we don't have a decision on this issue, we're creating a standard that will be hobbled out of the gate.  Its baseline negotiation mechanism means it has some freedom of movement, and it may eventually get up a good speed. But this hurts it in ways that it is very hard for us to ignore.  We'd be going out with a large likelihood of isolated WebRTC communities, especially in mobile apps, instead of a unified ecosystem.  Balancing that pain against this is not easy.  
> 
> We would have preferred to get consensus; we would have preferred over this to get an RFC 3929 decision.  And at no time did we propose imposing voting unilateraly.  We have sought the consensus of the working group on it, to see if this works as a last ditch effort to see if there is *any* way forward.  
> 
> So, three ex-ADs and two current ones agreed to go this far out on a limb to get some way forward. It was sufficiently important for us to put this out, _knowing we'd get an epic beat down for it_.  That's how much this decision means.
> 
> There may not be any way forward, and we'll accept that if that is the result of this discussion.  I personally continue to hope that this set of exchanges will raise awareness among working group participants of the importance of pushing to a common standard here, and that we may see some common ground emerge.  
> 
> regards,
> 
> Ted Hardie
> 
> 
>  
> Melinda
> 
>