Hi Michael,
on 2006-07-15 07:13 Michael Thomas said the following:
> Is it just in my part of the ietf woods, or is this becoming a widespread
> phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?
>
> On the one hand, it can be really difficult to get a feel for consensus on
> a mailing list where silence may mean agreement, boredom with the
> topic, or just... silence. And then there's the general problem that since
> we're engineers articulations of agreement generally start with some
> form of "it depends". So maybe a short hand way of saying "this is
> good enough for me, let's not go into the weeds by my agreeing for
> potentially different reasons" is a generally Good Thing.
>
> On the other hand, it sure seems like this sort of thing can be gamed.
> That is, somebody posts something and three or four of the usual suspect
> chime in with their +1 and lo and behold it looks a lot more like consensus
> than the previous "it depends" tomes. But is it really consensus, or is it
> just (benignly) a way for the usual suspects to signal to each other that
> they are willing live with another's proposal (which is not to say that
> that is necessarily a small thing in itself)? And what about when it's not
> benign? Could it be that +1 could be a way to short circuit inspection and
> debate in er, um, more, um, politicized settings?
>
> That and it seems all so very <aol>me too!</aol>
When I've seen it working best, the possible expressions of viewpoint
are: +1 +0 -0 -1 (and in a community with a benevolent dictator,
-10000 or some other large-magnitude negative number).
Personally, I know it best from the mailing list devoted to the development
of the Python programming language, where Python's creator, like a chair,
gives attention to community rough consensus, but unlike a chair has
the possibility of overriding the more-or-less rough consensus at times.
The possibility of expressing +0 and -0 seems to aid in sorting things
out and expressing people's preferences, too; and the expression of -1
without a reasoned explanation of why seems to be frowned upon.
I think that the reason why this seems to be a spreading meme could be
that when an informed discussion reaches a point where people believe a
clear solution is in sight, +1 is a visually very distinct way of saying
"Works for me".
Henrik
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