Re: [rtcweb] On the form of the question (was Re: Alternative consensus and MTI video codecs)

[Ron <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2013 at 08:01:08AM -0800, Adam Roach wrote:
> On 11/8/13 04:31, Ron wrote:
> >...what we had today was essentially "just a vote".  If it had been conclusive, that would have been great, but it wasn't...
> 
> Well, to be fair, it did involve a rather long discussion of the
> various factors impacting the decision. The show of hands was
> ostensibly an attempt to suss out whether the arguments had proven
> compelling enough to push forward with one codec over the other.

Right, I didn't mean that to sound critical of the chairs, I had my
chance to suggest alternatives when they first proposed this too,
I only meant that we tried something, it didn't get us a resolution,
but that failure is not the same thing as the working group reaching
the end of its rope for establishing consensus by more normal means.

We have still unanswered objections, I don't see how invoking any
alternative method can ignore those until they are answered (and
then also seek to call the result consensus).

And since the chairs asked for suggestions on "where to go from here"
I'm suggesting we get answers to those things and continue with a more
usual approach to achieving consensus on the list.  If people can't
answer them in a satisfactory way, they obviously remain blockers to
accepting that option as having consensus.


> On the other hand, what *did* happen was that we had roughly 50% of
> the room say that they were willing to live with H.264, and roughly
> 30% of the room say they were willing to live with VP8. This, after
> the chairs *strongly* *encouraged* people who could live with either
> option to raise their hands for both options. We didn't explicitly
> ask for who was in both camps (and those people at the front of the
> room facing the participants did nothing to gauge overlap), nor did
> we try to suss out who was abstaining by not raising their hand.

The jabber room by contrast, split more like 80/20 in favour of VP8.
And unless I'm missing someone there was no overlap there at all.

(And was endcapped with the comment: "So, those that actually use the
 Internet, by all data, support option #2, VP8."  :)


I still don't think we can call anything conclusive from that, except
the two groups were clearly not representative of each other in any
statistically significant way, and "dance with the one that brung ya"
and all that ...


> As a result, the numbers are meaningless. On one extreme: If those
> sets of people were completely disjoint, then we're nowhere near
> consensus. At the other extreme: if the set of people who could
> accept VP8 were a strict subset of the set of people who could
> accept H.264, then we would have obvious consensus and could move
> forward. I know that neither of these scenarios are true, but
> measuring where the participants fell in that continuum would have
> been the true measure of the sense of the room.
> 
> So, sadly, we learned nothing.
> 
> For the record, and I'm hoping others will follow suit (since, as
> you pointed out, consensus is measured on the list): I'm of the
> opinion that either of the two options on the table are
> acceptable[1][2].

I'd like to reserve my final call until we've seen the answers to
the objections on the list, but a choice with definite unresolved
blockers fairly obviously can't be acceptable as consensus.

  Ron