MOTU Decision Making Process

[Scott Kitterman]

On Tuesday 17 June 2008 11:33, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote:
> Excellent proposal!
>
> > 2.  MOTU discuss on the ML.
> >
> >
> > 5.  More discussion on the ML the selected person tries to guage
> > the rough
> > consensus of the group.
>
> Personally, I find it difficult to gauge concensus from a ML debate,
> especially if it's heated. Often, such a discussion tends to
> dissipate into several non-intersecting subdiscussions between a few
> very active participants, and the sense of the greater proportions is
> often lost. In addition, the outcome of such a discussion is also
> often dominated by the most persistent debater.
>
> I have no practical idea how to do this better, perhaps a blogging
> tool like Digg or Ubuntu brainstorm, where comments can be voted "up"
> or down, would let the rough concensus percolate through, but I have
> no knowledge of any such tool being available.
>
In IETF working groups (which is what I extracted this proposal from), it's 
generally one of two cases:

1.  It's pretty clear that everyone except one or two dissenters agree.

2.  It's not clear and so the working group chair (equivalent of what siretart 
suggested we call a shepard here) will explicitly solicit the consensus of 
the group by asking a question on the ML and asking everyone to reply with 
their view.

From these consensus calls, it's usually pretty clear where things stand.  
Also, since we know how many MOTU there are, we know how large the silent 
part of the polity is.

Scott K