[iot-wg] consensus v voting at RIPE

On Fri, Oct 12, 2018 at 07:59:41PM +0100, Jim Reid wrote:

> RIPE has always used consensus for all important decisions: WG charters, policy making, selecting WG chairs, etc. If you want to change that, you will need to persuade the RIPE community -- by consensus! -- to agree to use some other mechanism.

I am not sure I understand this advice.  To the best of my knowledge, the
chair selection is agreed upon by the WG itself and there is no pre-approved
toolbox to choose from, so I fail to see the need to convince the whole RIPE
community first.

> Voting at RIPE is not practical because there is no way of controlling who gets to vote or policing how often they do that. Since there's no membership or eligibility criteria, the concept of one member, one vote just doesn't make sense. Which is why we use consensus-based decision making for the big stuff. Many other institutions do that too, usually for similar reasons.

The fact that the constituency is not or only loosely defined is not
the reason for a consensus based approach.  Consensus is a process
(of compromise) to balance interests in multiple dimensions.
It is fairly applicable to binary decisions and has proven to not
work well for assigning chair positions - unless you expect people
to discuss each other's pros and cons in public and entertain the
embarrasment of having all those highlights publicly archived to eternity
on mailing lists or some video platform.  To avoid that, there's
always behind-the-curtain activity.  Drawing lots is probably less painful.

The current proposal qualifies, in my opinion, only because it is no
worse than the approach chosen by most of the other WGs.

-Peter (who pleas guilty as charged discussing meta rather than wg content)