Berin Loritsch wrote: > we need to come to community consensus. Everyone else wrote: > Blah di blah! We aren't capable of reaching consensus! It'll all end in tears!
For me the word consensus means a bit more than it does for many people. I took a course this summer out of an urban and regional planning department about conflict resolution -- negotiation and mediation. It was very enlightening. You might want to try reading something by Lawrence Susskind (http://web.mit.edu/publicdisputes/) or browsing around Google (http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Law/Organizations/Alternative_Dispu te_Resolution/?tc=1 and similar). It turns out that consensus building is not quite as straightforward as it seems, but can be extremely effective when implemented properly. On the other hand, some methods of 'consensus building' really just lead to more unpleasantness. >From what I've read, I'm somewhat suspicious of the notion that everything can be worked out in a semi-informal way by majority vote. There are some big issues on the table. It would be interesting if Apache started a mediation committee of neutral facilitators, but I don't expect such a thing to actually happen (it'd be extremely cool though, and might prove to be a tremendous asset given the current changing state of things). There's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff involved in consensus building, but I don't really know the internet sources. Here is just one example of the sort of things people need to think about. **Interests vs. Positions** Bob's position (a suggestion course of action or judgment): Steady development of Phoenix must continue! Bob's interest: What I really want is for my legacy code to continue working John Smith suggests: What if the uber-container was completely Phoenix compatible from the start? Trying to implement several forms of compatibility might even help us to maintain a modular code structure with healthy abstraction. Bob's response: I guess that would work out, but what about issues A, B, and C (i.e. short term before uber-container is ready for production)? (at this point everyone discusses how A, B, and C might be addressed, etc. A, B, and C should probably be related to a clearly identified interest, but such procedural policies are specified in the 'ground rules') It's really important to distinguish interests from positions. **end example** There are a lot of sound principles, like 'ground rules' (discussion happens in an organized and respectful fashion, etc. Ideally the community agrees on ground rules together), 'joint-gains' (everything doesn't have to be all or nothing at all -- be creative and look for solutions that don't ignore anyone's concerns) and a bunch of other cool stuff. Not only that, the principles are not just abstract speculation -- they've been proven to work time and time again. This is somewhat off the topic of software development though, so I'll shut up for now ;) Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
