RE: Consensus vs Voting (RE: [ga] DNSO General Assembly call to change seating rule)

["Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@verisign.com>]

How many GA members knew that a consensus vote was going to be taken?  Has
it been made clear that consensus votes can be taken at any time and
therefore it is critical to participate on the list, otherwise your lack of
participation will be interpreted as agreement with the position under
discussion?  Was any effort made to validate the representativeness of the
vote taken with regard to the total GA?  What measured criteria are used to
establish consensus or rough consensus?  Are these criteria defined on the
fly or are they agreed to in advance and clearly communicated?

In my opinion, all of these questions and many others need to be answered if
a valid consensus process is to be established.  Moreover, this does not
just apply to the GA, I believe it applies to DNSO working groups,
constituencies, etc.

Now to your point about whether you should have called for the vote.  I
think that was fine.  As I stated earlier, I just don't believe that the
results of the vote should be interpreted to be a GA rough consensus
position.  On the other hand, to report that the active participants on the
GA list during a specified period of time reached a rough consensus on the
the two points.  Communicating that to the NC would be appropriate.

If I was an NC member or a board member, when I was presented with a
recommendation that is claimed to be a consensus position, I would expect to
see some measurable data to back that up.  Otherwise, I would not be
convinced that consensus was truly reached.  My personal opinion is that no
DNSO group has done a very good job in this regard so far.  And I think that
in the next year it will be critical to work on this, that is, to establish
clearly defined consensus building criteria.

Chuck

-----Original Message-----
From: Harald Alvestrand [mailto:Harald@Alvestrand.no]
Sent: Saturday, November 11, 2000 4:10 AM
To: Gomes, Chuck; 'technizmo'; ga@dnso.org
Subject: Consensus vs Voting (RE: [ga] DNSO General Assembly call to
change seating rule)


At 07:46 10/11/2000 -0500, Gomes, Chuck wrote:
>The fact of the matter is that the GA has not established any sort of
>defined process for concluding that consensus has been reached.

It has. That process is called voting - see 
http://www.dnso.org/dnso/notes/2000.GA-working-procedures.html

The process chosen for voting takes some time to start, takes a week for 
the voting to run, and some work to do the tabulation afterwards. So we are 
looking at a delay of perhaps 2 weeks from the time a resolution is 
presented to the GA by the chair for action to the time the GA's consensus 
can be verified.

Anything but voting (including my declaration of "rough consensus) is 
really a personal judgment. I am coming to the conclusion that I should not 
have said anything on behalf of the GA, and let the seating resolution die 
the death of irrelevance.

              Harald



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