Subject: Does silence have no value? suggested for draft-resnick-on-consensus-06

From: Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 11:31:36 +0100

The draft needs to show that if a wg-chair is presenting (in meeting
or on lists) an individual draft to the WG for adoption, and no
answer/reply comes out, that does not mean against nor agree, I
recommend there is no value of no effort from the WG. Some WG may not
respond for adoption because they had no time for making a decision,
so I hope the Chairs don't misunderstand and make wrong decisions.

AB

On 2/11/14, Abdussalam Baryun <[email-masked]> wrote:
> usually in engineering *silence* should always have no
> value. Against SHOULD be with engineering reason, and agreeing MAY be
> with engineering reason.
>
> AB
>

---

From: Dave Cridland <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 14:51:39 +0000

> so I hope the Chairs don't misunderstand and make wrong decisions.

Calls for adoption are particularly interesting cases, because if there's
no response, then as chairman I have to assume there's no interest. This
could be because of lack of time, of course, but if merely checking the
draft over for adoption isn't worthy of effort, then I can't really expect
that once adopted, people will suddenly find the time to do serious work.

In other cases, however, silence can mean assent, or at least no interest
in arguing against. If a particular open issue in a draft is resolved by a
small group (or even a single person) picking a solution that works for
them, then an absence of complaints, despite not being quite the same, nor
as desirable, as enthusiastic and vocal support, still leads to the same
conclusion.

As for providing engineering reasons... I always prefer strongly to see an
solid technical reason for a position. It helps enormously in judging the
roughness. But if the reasoning is aesthetic, market-related, or a gut
feeling, that's nevertheless useful information. Since we deal in rough
consensus, not perfect agreement, even a real technical issue is not enough
to break rough consensus sometimes, but any reason might be - and in
general terms, I want to encourage open dissent.

This last principle is important for two reasons. The most obvious is that
we want to ensure that self-censorship doesn't cause people to avoid
speaking up when their concern is well-founded - especially true for less
experienced participants who may misjudge the value of their contribution
in either way. The other is that someone voicing just a nagging feeling
that the solution is "somehow wrong" might well jog other people into
noticing some real flaw.

On aesthetic and market-related reasons, two examples:

a) At one stage, the SASL working group were close to abandoning
human-readable names for new, GSSAPI-based, mechanisms. People argued
against this purely on the basis that it would have discouraged people from
implementing these newer mechanisms. This isn't a technical or engineering
argument, it's purely aesthetic, but it's nevertheless important.

b) With the on-going discussions about pervasive encryption, it's important
to recall that for many parts of the world, it's still against export
regulations to allow >56-bit encryption in binary software (ie,
non-open-source) to be exported to certain countries. There are strong
technical arguments against "export grade" encryption.

Dave.
(With apologies for the lack of flippant sarcasm in this message)

---

From: Scott Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2014 10:08:42 -0500

On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Dave Cridland <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Calls for adoption are particularly interesting cases, because if there's no
> response, then as chairman I have to assume there's no interest. This could
> be because of lack of time, of course, but if merely checking the draft over
> for adoption isn't worthy of effort, then I can't really expect that once
> adopted, people will suddenly find the time to do serious work.
>
> In other cases, however, silence can mean assent, or at least no interest in
> arguing against. If a particular open issue in a draft is resolved by a

One thing I've seen in WGs that I like is if there is a lot of
silence, the chair says what s/he assumes silence implies.  "If you're
silent, I'm going to assume that means you don't have any objection",
etc.

---

From: Loa Andersson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2014 00:04:13 +0800

Dave,

On 2014-02-12 22:51, Dave Cridland wrote:
> Calls for adoption are particularly interesting cases, because if
> there's no response, then as chairman I have to assume there's no
> interest. This could be because of lack of time, of course, but if
> merely checking the draft over for adoption isn't worthy of effort, then
> I can't really expect that once adopted, people will suddenly find the
> time to do serious work.

I think there are a couple of questions around that scenarion - wg
poll met by silence.

- the first is of course why a draft that there are no interest for
   ever were poll, at least the chair who started the poll must have
   thought that the draft had a chance to become a working group
   draft, why would it otherwise be polled
- if there are a participants in the working group, my guess is that
   there are 1.5a opinions what silence mean; my take ii is the wg chair
   to know the wg well enough to tell why people are silent
   There are a number of tricky positions around slience:
   First, there are those that won't bother to say anything unless they
   have objections making the draft a wg doc.
   Second, a number of people, quite easily defined does not say anything
   if the believe that the draft being polled will do no harm if it is
   accepted (there might be an overlap between group 1 and 2)
   Third, there are those that genuinely believe that silence means
   agreement, i.e. if I don't say anything at a wg poll it means that
   I agree
   Fourth there are that have not read the draft and therefore (quite
   sensible) don't respond
   Five, there are those that are opposed to make the draft a working
   group document, but are afraid if they say that they are opposed they
   will start a discussion that leads to that the document in the end
   will get accepted
   Six, those who are silent because a colleague and friend are one of
   the co-authors of the draft, but that would have been opposed under
   circumstances.
   Seven there are those that are in favor, but fear that if they say
   so it will generate more work for themselves
   Eight, there is those who always say something regardless of the
   subject, if they are silent it might be an idea to try to find out
   why.
   And variants thereof, but the point is that to the best of their
   abilities wg chairs should know the landscape. Working group rough
   consensus   is not measured by "hum" or "show of hands" it is called
   by the wg chairs using those and other tools.

The other point is that there never are total silence - and yes I admit
that not mails in response is disturbing - but there are some aspect
that chairs hs to consider.

- I assume that there are some discussion on the mailing list before a
   a draft is polled, should give a hint on where the wg are
- I assume the wg chairs review and agree on going ahead with the poll
- Then there are the folks that has be asked to read and comment prior
   the working group poll, I assume that no wg chair without quite a bit
   of discussion would start a wg poll on a document that the reviewers
   say is not ready
- And last there are the authors - very likely the folks that understand
   the subject best - that says that their draft is ready to become a wg
   document

Together this is quite a sizeable group that the wg chair can use to
break the silence.

Explicitly write in the poll that positive opinions are welcome helps
a lot.

Also if there after all no reactions anyway - the poll can always be
extended and a mail sent asking that those who have opinions actually
say so. It is allowed for authors and/or chairs to poke people they know
are up to speed on the subject and have them respond to the poll.

/Loa
-- 

Loa Andersson                        email: [email-masked]
Senior MPLS Expert                          [email-masked]
Huawei Technologies (consultant)     phone: +46 739 81 21 64