RE: What to call that direction/redirection/routing thing

["Mark Day" <markday@cisco.com>]

> Humm, I think that others have the right to express
> opinions --- so what is the strategy?

Opinions are fine.  I think I was explicit about that.

Votes are not so great. The problem comes at two levels, one having to do
with voting and one having to do with voting by email.

Voting is a bad idea when you're working for rough consensus because it
encourages a mindset that n+1 votes for "A" wins over n votes for "B".  In
terms of effective standard-setting and rough consensus, such a situation is
not a point at which you declare a victor, but a point at which you have to
get people to identify the issues and find some alternative way of making
progress.  Absence of majority-voting mechanisms is one of the key
differences between the way things proceed in the IETF and the way things
happen in many other standards groups.

Even if voting were a good idea, email votes work very poorly.  It's hard
for the voters to dispute or clarify the phrasing of the question, it's
tricky to set it up with the right times so that everyone knows when it ends
but also has a chance to vote, it's almost impossible to do a secret ballot,
and it's hard to judge the number of undecided voters.

In addition to fixing all those problems, a hum at an IETF meeting has the
handy additional property that it's analog: there's a limited ability to
indicate the strength of one's opinion in how loud one is humming.  There's
no possibility of winning with a narrow majority because people in the room
will disagree about which was the winner if the hums are close to the same
volume.

--Mark

Mark Stuart Day
Senior Scientist
Cisco Systems
+1 (781) 663-8310
markday@cisco.com