Subject: Re: Decision procedures

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:20:49 +0200

Bruce,

the IETF works by giving considerable latitude to the working group chairs 
- exactly because of the difficulty of giving exact rules for this type.
Still, I'll answer this one.

--On torsdag, juni 30, 2005 12:51:14 -0400 Bruce Lilly <[email-masked]> 
wrote:

> But back to the issue: where do we stand on the matter of the means
> of determining consensus?

> Do unsupported assertions count?

Yes. They count slightly less than assertions that "as everyone can see 
from my previous postings, this is true", and slightly less than "it's 
obvious from the mailing list archives going back 5 years that this is 
true".
They count a good bit less than "this is true for the reasons given in RFC 
xxx section 3.14, paragraph 5", and a good bit less than "this is true 
because of the following logic:"

> Do false statements count?

The statement "pi is equal to 3" will not be counted.
An unsupported statement that another statement is false counts - see above.

>  Is "I'm in favor of x, but I couldn't care
> less" weighed the same as "x will spell doom for the Internet"?

No. But it's of course far more easy to support the first assertion than 
the second (indeed, the fact that the first statement is made is usually 
counted as enough support to consider it true).

                         Harald