Re: [wg-review] Preliminary Report - Consensus

[Greg Burton <sidna@feedwriter.com>]

At 02:29 AM 1/16/01, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>There is a well known form of "consensus" building called "last man 
>standing" - with interest in this area on the order of hundreds of 
>thousands, and actual list membership in the +100s, a poll answered by ten 
>people based on an extremely busy mailing list needs a little 
>justification before being taken as ground rules for further work.

Yes, that's very true. As are Kent's comments about "too much voting" 
leading to hardened positions, and Rod's comments about possible question 
bias. Questions that keeps coming up for me are:

How do we get more people to participate in such polls?
How can we consistently frame questions and statements for polling in the 
cleanest, least-slanted way?
How should we clearly differentiate between polls to provide information 
for the WG, and votes on specific topics?
Should the concept of polling be included in a formal procedures 
recommendation to the NC or BoD?
What are the tradeoffs between poll security and widespread availability of 
raw poll data?

>That said, I believe the poll result is fairly representative of the 
>people speaking up in this discussion, and probably a fair reflection of 
>the feelings of a lot of people who have touched or participated in this 
>process.

I wouldn't claim more than that either.

Regards,
Greg

sidna@feedwriter.com

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