On Jun 12, 2013, at 4:43 AM, Dave Cridland <d...@cridland.net<mailto:d...@cridland.net>> wrote: I suspect the closest we get to getting an idea of IETF consensus is the interest gauging at the beginning of the process, though interestingly this is only positive interest - objections to doing the work at all aren't really relevant here. The IETF consensus on the charter is handled by Apathy Is Assent rules, so claiming that this consensus call becomes the default is an interesting argument to make.
Working group charters go by much less frequently than new drafts; the burden of checking them is about as low as any comprehensive review burden in the IETF can possibly get. So if you don't comment on a charter when it goes by, and you don't comment on the work the working group does, you have only yourself to blame. The IETF doesn't have members, so we can't say "only 10% of IETFers like this idea, so we won't bother with it." We don't have voting, so we can't issue a ballot and count up the yeas and nays. If you want to limit the number of RFCs published, you need to voluntarily do the work that is required to make that happen. If you think there's a problem with the charter, and you raise it on the IETF mailing list, there will be no shortage of discussion. Trust me on this. OK, so we don't have voting but we do have a quorum? How wonderful. And given that the majority of people are silent means they agree (with, mind, everything - not just that they're not reading), so any number of people are therefore "few". Right. We don't have members, so we can't have a quorum. That's just not how the IETF operates. If you prefer to operate in an SDO that operates that way, you can either change the IETF, or work in a different SDO. I strongly feel that positive statements have value, as they allow the community to gauge the level of review and consensus, and I suspect that human nature means that we get more reviews if people get to brag about it. If the only reason you are doing a review is so you can brag about it, that seems a bit useless to me. But in any case, as you say, Pete made his point, you don't agree with it, it's a matter of opinion, so we're bikeshedding. FWIW, my reason for responding to these questions on ietf@ietf.org<mailto:ietf@ietf.org> is that before I became an AD, I actually didn't _know_ how IETF consensus was determined, and had to do quite a bit of looking around to figure it out when I suddenly needed to know. So I thought it was worth sharing; if in fact there are a lot of IETF participants who think this is the wrong way to handle last call, you really ought to get together and do a BOF. That too is how the IETF thinks about things—it is only a bureaucratic quagmire if you make it one. Should it really be _easy_ to change how the IETF evaluates consensus?
