Re: [wg-review] Resumption of Review.

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 08:24:13PM -0700, Greg Burton wrote:
[...]
> What move? I wrote:
> 
> "The suggestion has been made that we simply try to summarize material, and 
> incorporate minority opinions on the summaries into the report.
> 
> Any comments?"
> 
> That's a request for input, not a "move". I personally think it would be a 
> good idea, but if the WG doesn't want to do it, we won't.

1) The stated motivation for this change is that the population voting
would be so small that the results would be irrelevant.  But in fact,
that was true from the beginning of this WG.  Relative to the size of
the stakeholder community, the 150 original members of this WG were a
tiny unrepresentative dust mote, and it was absurd to think that the
votes expressed anything remotely close to a representative sample.  In 
fact, it is very clear that there are very strong selection effects in 
force that *guarantee* that the votes would not be representative.

2) This problem (non-representativity of WGs and other groupings) is
fundamental and intrinsic, and was realized back from the very early
days of the DNSO. 

3) It's interesting to note that this mechanism (summarizing material
and incorporating minority opinions) is precisely the mechanism
described in the bylaws.  It's a good one; we should have used it from
the beginning, and avoided voting altogether -- it does nothing but
convey misleading information -- sort of like asking professional
baseball players to vote about which sport is best. 

-- 
Kent Crispin                               "Be good, and you will be
kent@songbird.com                           lonesome." -- Mark Twain
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