Re: [Last-Call] Consensus call (was: Other stuff)

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 26 Oct 2022, at 16:46, Keith Moore wrote:

> On 10/26/22 16:29, Pete Resnick wrote:
>
>> Second, determining (rough) consensus is not our call to make. It's 
>> the IESG's in the case of IETF-wide Last Calls. Pointing out that a 
>> particular view has not been taken into account in the discussion 
>> seems perfectly reasonable to me, but I don't think claiming that 
>> there is or isn't rough consensus is particularly useful or 
>> appropriate (anymore than saying, "Pete's point definitely beats 
>> Stu's point" is).
>
> I almost agree, except for two things:
>
> (1) A volunteer organization is ultimately responsible to its 
> volunteers, and it's vital that we keep our facilitators honest. When 
> a WG chair, or for that matter IESG, declares consensus and there's 
> clearly not a consensus (or vice versa) the first line of defense from 
> the community is to point out that they've made a dubious call.   
> Sometimes the chair will reconsider their decision in light of such 
> feedback, which is a lot less overhead and less stress than an appeal.
>
> (2) In this case, however, private responses to iesg@ are explicitly 
> permitted.   So in this case there's no way that anyone but IESG can 
> be expected to take into account the full spectrum of responses when 
> determining consensus.
>
> (In the event of an appeal on the consensus call, presumably IAB can 
> request to see all of those messages, and IAB's liason to IESG will 
> presumably be able to provide them.)

Completely agree; I actually started to add a paragraph about the appeal 
thing (both the informal, "Hey chair, I think you might have blown it" 
and the formal sort), but left it out because I didn't want to belabor 
the point. But absolutely, that is the appropriate time to question a 
consensus caller if they have not sufficiently explained their 
determination.

Note that all IESG Last Call announcements explicitly permit 
("exceptionally", they say) private comments to be sent to the IESG. If 
a determination is based in part on those comments (for any Last Call), 
and the determination would be "surprising" to the community, I would 
expect the content of such comments to be explicitly noted in the IESG's 
decision.

pr
-- 
Pete Resnick https://www.episteme.net/
All connections to the world are tenuous at best