Subject: [Tools-discuss] Re: Voting Idea? (Was: Last Call: 'Requirements for IETF DraftSubmission Toolset' to Informational RFC)

From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Apr 2005 15:12:53 +0200

And I didn't say "voting"; that was Jeroen.

The free site I found says "voting"; of course, what the IETF
can use such things for is only straw polls. But in a case
like the present one, I think that is a reasonable way of
finding out what the centre of gravity of opinion is.

In ASCII art:
                   /\
Consensus:   ____/  \___

                       /\
Rough Consensus  ____/  \___/\___

Badly phrased question: ___/\____/\____/\____/\___

(I'm reasonably serious about that)

    Brian

Romascanu, Dan (Dan) wrote:
>>From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On 
>>Behalf Of Jeroen Massar
>>
>>On Wed, 2005-04-06 at 11:52 +0200, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
>>
>>>Well, I thought I'd try something daring. We have people
>>>arguing about xml versus nroff (again). If you write Internet
>>>Drafts, try this toy (and only vote once, please...).
>>>If the toy doesn't work, don't blame me... I just found the
>>>site with Google.
>>>
>>>http://www.internationalvoting.com/int3/ask.cgi?pid=22-143
>>
>>As this is the tools discussion after all, might it maybe be 
>>a good tool
>>to have a voting tool for the IETF?
>>
> 
> 
> When the IETF Chair says 'voting' you should take it as a metaphor, I believe. 
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ietf mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
> 

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---

From: "Romascanu, Dan \(Dan\)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 15:10:17 +0300

Dan

---

From: Thomas Narten <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:27:35 -0400

> Badly phrased question: ___/\____/\____/\____/\___

Right. Like most techniques, "voting" is a tool. And like any tool, it
can be misused, or ineffective.

Voting breaks down when it is used avoid finding true consensus, and
is instead used to just make a decision and move on -- regardless of
whether the decision made is actually a well-considered one. It is
this area the IETF needs to avoid falling into.

Personally, I'm more in favor of "votes" than just hums, the reason
being that a count of hands is unambiguous data. In contrast, the
results of a hum are more subject to interpretation, where one's
perspective of the results of a hum may well depend on which side of
the room one happens to be sitting. And if one reads from the WG
minutes that "the hum said x", one really can't challenge what that
means, becuase there is no agreed-upon data on which to draw
conclusions from. In contrast, with a count of hands, it's much harder
to argue that 100 to 20 "vote" is not strong support for a particular
direction. Likewise, a "vote" of 5 to 2 says something pretty
significant too, i.e., serious lack of participation.

Thomas

---

From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 15:12:11 +0300 (EEST)

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Thomas Narten wrote:
> the room one happens to be sitting.

FWIW, I personally prefer humming because my belief is that unless the 
rough consensus is sufficiently strong (so that it's clear no matter 
which part of the room you stand), the WG should probably be better 
off seeking better consensus than deciding that (for example) 1/3 of 
people voted X, and 2/3 voted for Y.

> And if one reads from the WG
> conclusions from.

This is true, of course.

> In contrast, with a count of hands, it's much harder

Very weak humming could also be minuted as such, of course.

Maybe a part of the issue is that when the minute-taker is not a 
chair, it may be more difficult to document the result of the 
consensus call.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings

---

From: Margaret Wasserman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 08:05:25 -0400

Hi All,

I agree with what Thomas is saying below, with on clarification...

>significant too, i.e., serious lack of participation.

I think that hand-raising or mailing list straw polling is a better 
technique to get data about the response to a particular question, 
because it is less ambiguous and less prone to vagaries of 
interpretation.  Getting a somewhat accurate count of the opinions 
expressed in the room also makes it possible to follow RFC 2418 which 
says:

    In the case where a consensus which has been reached during a face-
    to-face meeting is being verified on a mailing list the people who
    were in the meeting and expressed agreement must be taken into
    account.  If there were 100 people in a meeting and only a few people
    on the mailing list disagree with the consensus of the meeting then
    the consensus should be seen as being verified.

I, personally, lack the ability to quantify a "hum" and compare it to 
the number of people who respond to a mailing list poll.

I do not think that the difference between a "straw poll" and 
"voting" lies in how you count the respondents, I think that the 
difference lies in what you do with the results.

Voting is used to _make_ the decision.  In voting, there is a defined 
majority (more than half, more than two-thirds, etc.) that is needed 
to make a specific decision, and difficult decisions may be made by 
one vote.  To be done fairly, voting also requires quorum and 
eligibility rules.

In the IETF, we use straw polls to get a sense of how many people in 
the room have an opinion on a particular topic, and whether there is 
a consensus of opinion among those people.  IETF decisions are seldom 
black-and-white, sometimes there are a spectrum of choices available. 
After a poll, the chair may ask those who voted in the minority to 
state their reasons for doing so, in an attempt to find a compromise 
and/or place on the spectrum that will gain consensus.

This is quite different than making a decision by voting, regardless 
of how the straw poll is conducted (hand-raising, humming, web 
"voting" tools).

Margaret

---

From: "Marshall Eubanks" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 08:50:00 -0400

Hello;

The trouble with voting (as opposed to straw polls)
in a setting such as this is that it opens
the door for vote packing, which I have seen happen in other
organizations, with very bad results.

If anyone who comes can vote, what's to stop Company XYZ from
sending enough people to the WG meeting to make sure that the
vote goes its way ? Nothing, as things stand now. Preventing that
would require a lot more formality, such as registered members,
company memberships, one vote per company, etc., obviously a
profound change for the IETF. Moving to 
voting without doing that will eventually lead to disaster.

So, I would vote not to move to voting.

Regards
Marshall Eubanks

On Thu, 7 Apr 2005 08:05:25 -0400

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From: Jeroen Massar <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:48:06 +0200

On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 08:05 -0400, Margaret Wasserman wrote:

> the room have an opinion on a particular topic,

This room factor is also one of the reasons why I mentioned e-mail in my
message. Each WG has a set of active participants and a number of people
who don't visibly work, might lurk or do a lot of work behind the scenes
on the topic of the WG, at least these people are reading, hopefully,
the messages on this list. What if one of the hard working persons has a
lot to do, or due to sickness or whatever reason, maybe business
somewhere, raising his/her kids, or what about the very normal reason:
no time and money, to not attend an IETF meeting. Then this person will
not be in the room and thus can't participate in a vote, for which
he/she worked very hard to get around. This thus basically means that if
he/she can't be there all his work could be just hummed away by some
proponent sending in a lot of people, who never did anything at all, and
might not even know anything on the subject and let them hum their tone.

In short..... if you don't have a lot of financial backing one is not
getting anywhere in an organization that is supposed to based on
individuals, whom are supposed to be doing work on free open internet
standards, but are unable to do so over that internet they are making
those standards for...

Just my two cents ;)

Greets,
 Jeroen

---

From: Sam Hartman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 10:56:13 -0400

>>>>> "Pekka" == Pekka Savola <[email-masked]> writes:

    Pekka> On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Thomas Narten wrote:
    >> Personally, I'm more in favor of "votes" than just hums, the
    >> reason being that a count of hands is unambiguous data. In
    >> contrast, the results of a hum are more subject to
    >> interpretation, where one's perspective of the results of a hum
    >> may well depend on which side of the room one happens to be
    >> sitting.

    Pekka> FWIW, I personally prefer humming because my belief is that
    Pekka> unless the rough consensus is sufficiently strong (so that
    Pekka> it's clear no matter which part of the room you stand), the
    Pekka> WG should probably be better off seeking better consensus
    Pekka> than deciding that (for example) 1/3 of people voted X, and
    Pekka> 2/3 voted for Y.

Strongly agree.  I dislike it when minutes have careful counts of
straw polls.