Hi Ted,
At 08:00 01-08-2013, Ted Lemon wrote:
We actually had a talk about this amongst
several IESG and former IESG members. I am not going to
Bernard Aboba once mentioned:
To paraphrase Tilda Swinton's Oscar Acceptance Speech:
"To the IESG, you know, the seriousness and the
dedication to your art... you rock, man!"
report the results, because I might remember
them wrong, but my thoughts on this are as follows:
- The hum is not a means of determining
consensus; it is a means of determining the
sense of the room. If the hum is clearly many
in favor, nobody against,then you have
consensus, but that's unusual. If the hum
shows many in favor and some against, you need
to go to the next step, because you do not yet know whether you have consensus.
- So since the hum was quite inconclusive, the
next question is, "can somebody who objects
please say why." One way to approach that is
to ask for a show of hands. Here, the chairs
could have asked for a show of hands against—the
show of hands for was unnecessary. But this is
forgivable, I think, unless you think people
were intimidated by the show of hands for. I
think that would be hard to argue, given that
they had already heard the result of the hum.
- So the show of hands against elicited no
hands. I was there, that's what I remember seeing too.
So at this point, what do you do? Nobody is
willing to stand up and say "I think we
shouldn't go forward with this because of
X." Many people have said "we think we should
go forward with this, support doing this, and want to participate."
To me, that's consensus.
The above comment about consensus is an opinion. :-)
In my opinion part of the answer has been
provided by Brian Carpenter. The other part of
the answer is the minutes. The rest of the
answer is in something mentioned in the Note Well.
Regards,
-sm